ozzchick

can you elaborate please?

Yup agree

I beg to differ................i nearly lost my 2 clowns when treating my tank with flourish excel..........luckily i remembered about clowns being sensitive and removed them from the tank. They came right after 24 hrs but i will NEVER treat my tank with anything again without first removing them, unless its a specific treatment for them, in which case i will be researching it thoroughly!

Well i have a tank full of guppys of all ages, lots of babys and used to have alot of adults as well but they are dying off like wildfire! I have noticed over the last few weeks that the females have a flat belly. I know guppys should have a nice plump looking belly but these ones are totally flat! Is there a disease or deformity that causes this? I'm at a loss as to what it could be........

You sure will!! I will be at the cat show serving FOOD!!

with the help of another 'fishy' person,.................. AHEM red!! im not FISHY,im dodgy remember LOL

Welcome along bikbok, good to see you made it here. You will find all the help you need here, Enjoy!

I was given some fish which have what i think is maybe fungus. The neons seem to be mostly affected and after reading through these forums it was looking like cotton mouth. One of the neons has a huge blob on its mouth,another has a smaller white bit on its mouth and one has white tips on its tail fins and one looks so pale i will be surprised if it makes it! Theres also some rasboras and rosy tetras which dont look too bad, and serpae tetra one of which has 1 fin to its name!! Im guessing they had been kept in pretty shocking water conditions to get in that state. I put them straight into a hospital tank and treated them with tonic salt and furan2 according to directions. Its been just over a week and the huge blob on the neon dosent seem to have shrunk any. The fish are much more active than when i first got them and seem alot happier. How long should it be before i notice any difference? and how long should i wait before adding the healthier of these fish to my main tank? Thanks for any help

yeah i read an article yesterday, dated 2005, which described the 2 options to get better quality. One was pumping it from the kaiapoi aquifier all the way along lineside rd......this water wouldnt have needed treating but would require employing people to monitor it and higher power usage and the other was to get water from shallow groundwater from the Ashley Aquifer in the Rangiora area treat it using UV Disinfection which would mean new treatment plants etc. Looks like they still havent made their minds up what they will do!!

LMAO i musta got them all Maybe the waimak river will have some,if you drive up river towards the mountians,not that far though lol, you may find some as the wood at kairaki comes from up river anyway! You could get it before anyone else does and if you have dogs you could take them out for a run at the same time

No......it dosent make my eyes burn, it just stinks like a bucket of bleach that you would mix up to soak whites in. I shower in it all the time and its never affected my eyes

Yep i know!! I was born and raised in CHCH and my parents still live there. Gimme out of town living any day!! i can deal with the water issue over living in CHCH again,havent lived there for 17yrs now!

I am in Rangiora,(30 mins Nth of CHCH) Its bloody disgusting........you run the tap and all you can smell is chlorine, like a swimming pool!! Its about the only thing i hate about living here :-?

Thanks for that, will do that from now on

the water is straight from the tap, maybe that is the problem. The water here stinks of chlorine too. How long should i let it sit before adding it to the tank?

Yeah i thought the same, thought the levels could have been high before even getting in my tank so i tested my tap water and it was fine, nothing in it. I did another water change last night, changed just under 50% and retested after about an hour and couldnt believe what i saw, it had skyrocketed to 80ppm or more. I just tested it again and its back down to 20ppm again. Will do another water change in 3 days and see what happens. How long after changing the water should i test the nitrates?

its accessed from beach road,Kaiapoi. Follow the road down as far as you can go,dont turn off to the left at pines beach keep following the main road and you will come to Kairaki beach settlement.Drive to the end of the road and hang a left,park up somewhere and go for a walk,talk to the fishermen and whitebaiters (if they are still about) Havent looked there myself but collected some cool rocks and wood from the Ashley riverbed on the western outskirts of Rangiora

I clean my filter every few weeks,yesterday being the most recent and was all clear..........and xmas day i ripped everything out of the tank trying to catch a big fat bully of a SAE and there was no corpses to be found lol although the SAE decided he didnt like being taken away from the other fish and commited suicide by jumping out RIP SAE

OK so the dosage rate on the bottle says 5ml per 50 ltrs, if i start doing water changes of say 50ltrs twice a week i still use 17.5 mls of plant food not 5mls? I have always added it into the clean water before i put it in the tank but i spose its 6 of one and half a doz of the other. Will see how i go with more frequent water changes first before i try the GAC

They arent so much melting away and dying, but turning brown. Yes i do use a suppliment for the plants, Vitapet aquarium plant food which is by the way phosphate free. I use it at each water change. I realised a few weeks back that i was adding too much :oops: i was adding the amount for 180ltrs instead of the amount for the ltrs i was taking out and replacing, what a dork :roll: lol. I have 3 light tubes in the lid of my tank and they go on when i get up in the morning and get turned off anywhere from 11pm - 2am, whenever i go to bed. They could probably benefit from being replaced though but when ive got the money to do it, it will happen. I will see if i can find some indian fern somewhere and give it a go, thanks

I suppose thats likely, although when i do water changes i use a gravel vac every time. What is GAC? Is there a water test for phosphate?

No the level always seems to sit around 15-20 ppm, its just that my plants always go brown and im trying to find out how to stop that. My fish are all happy and healthy its just me thats not lol. Theres nothing more dissapointing for me that to put a nice new bright green plant in my tank then a week later its going brown! That is a great idea VinsonMassif, but i have 2 killifish which i forgot to include on my list earlier (oops) and they jump through the smallest of gaps so your idea isnt really an option in this tank. I may give it a try in one of my smaller tanks though as i like the look of that!! Will try feeding maybe every 2nd day instead of every day as well. Thanks everyone for your ideas

okie dokie,so should i maybe do 2 a week, or stick to once a week but maybe do 50% instead of 30%?

Tank is 180ltrs, running a Fluval 104. I have 1 clown loach,1 tiger loach,1 golden algae eater.1 bristlenose plec (small), 1 blackline flying fox (small),4 rosy tetras,4 glow light tetras,2 black tetras,2 kuhli loaches,1 male siamese fighter a pearl gourami and around 8-10 young guppys

ok,what do you mean by increase the filtration?