Ira

Yeah, I do use tap water, but my house is on tank water. So the only minerals dissolved in it would be whatever it absorbs on the way from the clouds to the gutters to the tank. Probably all that's in it is a bit of organics and no real minerals. I SHOULD get a hardness test kit.

I found my electric blue dead yesterday. I don't know how long she was dead, I don't remember seeing her wednesday night when I did a water change or at night when I fed them, but that's not unusual. I THINK she might have been dead for a while because the tank was smelling really nasty and was oily on top. I checked the PH, ammonia and nitrates. Everything was fine except for the PH, it was 6ish. Now, could a fish rotting in the tank drop the PH a lot or would it have been the low PH that killed her? I know the low PH is bad, I'm working on fixing it, going to put a bit of baking soda in today and tomorrow I'm going to see if I can find a digital PH meter. I thought I had the PH in the tank sorted before I started doing an extra 50% water change each week. It WAS sitting at about 6.8ish. I guess the extra change eliminated most of the buffering capacity from the bit of crushed shells in the filter, gravel or whatever.

Speaking of white cloud mountain minnows, saw a bunch of them at Fins and Fangs in Wellington last weekend. Beautiful fish, I personally think they're nicer looking than neons. I'd have bought some if they weren't cold water.

In the technical forum, the aquaclear filters thread. You said, "I now wonder if the ones Ira meant are different too. " Maybe I did say something about aquaclears, but I can't remember or find it. I must be getting really popular, hehehe.

Yeah, 30-40% every 2 weeks would be better than 20% every week. Though, I'd do at least 30% weekly. My 3 tanks I've actually been doing 50% biweekly changes on two of them and about 25% biweekly on the third.

Ira what's? :-? I didn't think I'd posted anything in this thread. That's the second time in 2 days someone seems to have confused me with someone else, last time was Caryl. Unless there's another Ira?

I'm not sure how to convert MG/L into PPM like I'm used to but...The only thing I'd keep an eye on if I were you is the nitrate and nitrite, but given time the nitrite should sort itself out once the tank cycles. The PH looks good. Hardness really isn't something you need to worry about. Most fish will be happy in any kind of reasonable hardness from soft to hard and since you say you're an amateur with (I think) reasonably tough fish it's not going to make a big enough difference to worry about. As for the light, the plants should do ok and grow slowly, but they would be happier with more light.

Even the RO/DI water isn't likely to kill most fish. Well, maybe if it's lived in hard water all its life and you just plonk it into a tank full of RO/DI water. I've read of a lot of discus owners using nothing but RO/DI water and doing huge, like 90% water changes daily with young discus. Seems the only real problem with it is that you can get bigger PH swings because of the lack of buffering. I guess a PH of 7 also wouldn't be quite ideal either, but I guess they must consider the more extremely clean water to be more advantageous than the disadvantage of the slightly un-ideal PH. Ooops, off on a bit of a tangent.

Ummm...Turquoise?

Fun? Ick, definitely not fun. Hmmm, You blend your mix to almost liquid? Maybe I didn't blend mine enough. Hey, Warren, wouldn't happen to be willing to sell me a batch next time you do some? hehehe.

That would take a lot more artistic skill than I have.

Well...No, the water can't go straight from the intake pipe to the outlet pipe. Not at more than a trickle anyway, when you close the lid it's basically sealed so that the water is forced to go downwards because there's a wall in the sponge holder and another wall made up of the media baskets. The outlet is also sealed so that it only sucks water from the top media basket. This is of course if everything is all tight like it should be, they're not sealed with o-rings and pressure fittings or anything. I guess with wear it could get worse, but I'd guesstimate that even with a lot of wear the water that's bypassing the sponges and media to be negligable. If you really want to go to all the trouble to modify your fluval to eliminate that 1 Liter per day that doesn't get filtered, have fun.

Wow, that's gonna get really crowded as your sharks, angels and gouramis grow. And you'll find your neons and guppies disappearing, I've heard angels will eat neons, and I know silver sharks will eat guppies and neons. I'm not one to talk about crowded tanks, mine is pretty crowded too, but it's a 50 gallon.

Well, looks like either glutenized rice flour doesn't work, or I didn't mix it in well enough. Looks pretty interesting when the fish swallow a chunk and then spend 10 seconds puffing white clouds out their gills. Makes them look like they're smoking. It also didn't hold together very well, so there are little fragments floating all over the tank. Now I've gotta decide what to do with what I made, I don't really want to feed it to them if it makes that much of a mess, but there's a pretty big lot of it. Guess the dog might get it, she got what was left of the beefheart and liver, so looks like she'll end up getting ALL of it.

Haha, What do you want them to do? Swallow it?

Still couldn't find any gluten flour, found some "Glutenized rice flour" so I'm trying that.

Next time you post that recipe, better put a warning in it. That is the most HORRIBLE smelling stuff I've ever put in a blender, got the wifey pretty annoyed with me. Cats went nuts over it though, they really wanted some. I'm definitely not experimenting, cause if it doesn't work I don't want to have to go through it AGAIN soon, YUCK! I'll run to a health foods place in upper hutt and check there, if they don't have gluten flour, then I might try the normal flour.

Pak&save doesn't have a very big health food section. So, regular flour won't work? I'm in the middle of making it right now. Should I leave out the flour until tomorrow and see if I can find the flour at a health food store tomorrow to finish it?

Ok, I've got just about everything for it. Couldn't find any gluten flour though. Will regular flour do? And got Ox heart instead of beef, close enough I think. I'm only doing about 1/5th of the recipe and it looks like it's going to make mountains of food. Hope I can fit it in one of our freezers.

Hehe, Yeah, it's basically like eating your filter media. How do you feed it to them, Warren? Break off a chunk of it frozen and toss it into the tank? Sounds like it would make a bit of a mess unless it was swallowed before it had time to melt and disintegrate.

All the meat is raw, I assume? I might try making up a tiny batch, only problem is that you can't buy liver and beef heart in small bits, and I don't want to have to buy a kilo just to use 1/10th of it. No way I'm going to eat the leftover liver!

There wouldn't be enough bacteria in the tank to convert more than a tiny amount of ammonia in one hour. If there was that much there would have to be a much higher constant production of ammonia to support them, otherwise the bacteria would starve to death until the numbers dropped back to just enough to match the production of ammonia. If the ammonia was about 1 PPM in the canister filter that would be diluted to probably less than .1 PPM even in a small tank. Anyone want to volunteer to shut off their filter to see? Next time I have a power outage or forget to reconnect the filter I'll try to remember to test it. I guess .1 PPM might be enough to bother something like discus...But...I hate discus.

Hmmm, that sounds pretty interesting. Sounds like a pain in the ass to prepare though. Do you just break a chunk off for each tank and toss it in, or what?

I've had my filter left unplugged for a day and a half(Stupid of me, oops) and then plugged it back in. About an hour afterwards I tested the ammonia and there was none. This is on a tank with only a relatively light bio load though, about 50 tetras in 120ish liters. I'd be really interested to see what the ammonia reading would be of the water coming directly out of the filter after being shut down for a few hours. I'd tend to think it would be very small, there isn't that much of a mass of bacteria in the filter. Not arguing, Warren, just commenting.

I wouldn't think the depth would matter in any tank you're likely to get inside a house. Even in a tall hexagonal tank the water pressure would only be somewhere around 4 PSI, if it leaks under that, it's not very well made, IMO.