suphew

I have a marine about the same size and use a eheim 1060 (2250lph(?))as a sump return, works well. They come up second hand often usually for a round $100. Or if you want new/cheap theres a guy on trademe selling resun king 4's pond pumps for around $100 or less, I have used one, they are okay but you get what you pay for.

Sorry theres a size limit on crays to. DOC don't care if you are taking them to eat or keep in a tank, if they find out you will get fined. You would need a pretty large tank to keep a legal one.

You would need to know that you have constant supply, otherwise your tank parameters will change when you stop using it. Also rain might change the water parameters plus it might test okay now but next week doc might do a poison drop in the hills, etc etc, to many unknowns for me, I wouldn't risk it.

Believe there is a size limit on snapper, which means you cant keep them.

Carbon bags are not much good for transferring bacteria, they aren't made to have bacteria growning on them and have low surface area. Also you should be replacing them often so they shouldnt have time to get much growing in them

I wouldn't panic, as long as your water quality is good you shouldnt have to many problems and most things can be treated if they crop up. Have you tested the water in CHC? I think it is bore water, in which case it might be quite hard which isn't so good for discus, I use a rain water collection tank even tho wlg water is basically rain water anyway. You should be be testing your PH which would be high if your water is hard. Your local council should be able to give you average water parameters. You need to look for the KH (should be low)and PH (which you know about).

if you treat the worming pills 2 or 3 times you should get the whole lot. Since you are moving them how about putting them in a temperary tank then treating them to increase your chances. Remember that unless you are using completely different nets, buckets etc etc there is a chance that you have transferred them between tanks anyway.

Have heard of poeple putting them in the fridge, some think it is mean cause it takes a while for them to die, others say it is ok cause they just slow down then go to sleep and die.

Tetras are fine with Discus, but not if your worried about them being sick already (or they have sick tank mates cause they could be carriers).

I use hot water for my discus plus have old copper header tank, not been a problem

But are you using any of them? The white spot cure will be either meth blue or mel green, either will work. If you have started treating I think you are doing all you can, just wait a few days. Also if you haven't treated yet do the water change then treat, if you have treated maybe hold off a day or two for the water change otherwise you will just be removing your treatment. You said you are in the middle of nowhere?? Are you on bore or tank water? Maybe you should think about doing a few set of tests on it (or take some to shop next time you go and ask them to) Bore water can be really hard (high in minerals) tank (rain) water can be really soft plus both can have alot of other not so good stuff in them. A good test would give you peace of mind or might give you an idea what sort of fish you should be keeping. i.e. a good supply of soft water is great if you want to keep tetras or discus!

No you MUST use the correct one, I have been there and done that, the incorrect one DOES NOT WORK, it might not fail straight away (it did for me 3 x in a row, luckerly when I was testing to make sure it worked. As soon as I used the correct one, no problems) but it will fail. It is the really smelly one you must use, plus it doesn't harm your tank, can even be used underwater, I just glued a tap into my new marine setup a month ago, waiting maybe 1/2 hour or less before filling with water, if I can do this with marine inverts in the tank there is noway it will harm fresh water fish. You have been warned!! :lol:

I think a single cannister filter for a tank this size would have to be one of the bigger ones. I don't think it would cost much more to put in two smaller. i.e. two fluval 204's cost about the same as one fluval 404's

I find melafix works well to, for helping with damaged fins (and it smells nice!) And might be a better option if there are loaches in the tank. Its a bit hard to tell from the pictures but a bad case of white spot looks like a dusting of fine white sand, most fungus I have have seen is localized in a few areas on a fish usually near a wound, mouth, or gill and looks like a fuzzy patch. If this is white spot it looks like quite a bad case plus the fins look clamped which is also a bad sign. Have you started treating yet? If not I would get onto it asap. FYI I use methylene blue only to treat white spot, I read that malchite green causes cancer, proberly complete crap but methylene blue works well so..... Once the treatment starts you should notice an improvement in just a few days, I'm always amazed how fast fish heal once they have the right treatment. Not sure what you have in the tank but a small piece of wood might make the plec happier, he will chew on the wood and it will give him something to hide under causing him less stress.

Assume you know there are two types silicon (cure two different ways), one of which doesn't work. I can never remember which is which but I'm sure one will tell us, the one you want is the really strong smelling one and seems to me to be less common in shops.

For what its worth I run mine end to end as per Aqua, my thinking was that if I ran one each end the water in the middle of the tank MIGHT not make it to the filter.

I have used dog tablets before a few times. I use about 1/4 tab ground up and mixed with 1 or 2 cube discus tucker. Dosing is pretty random anyway because there is no way making each fish only eat their share of the treated food, some times one fish will just be lucky and get the big mouthful while another might be on the other side of the tank when the food goes in and get very little. Its important that you treat the whole tank any fish that don't show sign might be carriers. This is a common problem with angels and is a reason some people recommend not keeping them with discus.

Sorry I keep coming back to water but as I said before most diseases are caused by poor water, I may be wrong but from what I have read of what you have done so far I think you need to address this first. There seems to be a lot of misconceptions regarding using old water and juck from filters. Firstly the old water, the point of cycling a tank is to get the bacteria fully established and the denitrification cycle working, while it is good to use old water for other reasons, it actually has very little bacteria in it (realitive to the total in the tank), the bacteria mostly lives on surfaces like your gravel, filter media, plants etc etc not free floating in the water so it doesn't really help getting a new tank cycled. Secondly using gunk from your filters does help, but it only helps, it doesnt remove the cycling process, and remember that along with the good bacteria you are also adding a whole lot of extra polutants (i.e. all the gunk). And just to add to the difficulties your filter bacteria has been living in an environment with oxygenated water flowing through it, unless you have added this to a new filter and it in the same type of environment there is a good chance that a lot of the bacteria will die and add to the tank polution in the tank. Assuming I not missing something with what you have done, if you have a filter on your new tank why not swap it with the one on your old tank for a while this will get the cycle going really quickly plus will mature your new filter a lot faster to. If you don't have a second filter you could still move the old filter onto your new tank for a couple of weeks, if the old tank is running well removing the filter for a couple of weeks wont hurt it.

Sounds to me like your 'tonic' is snake oil, White spot is a parasite and fin rot is fungal. Each require totally different treatments. Firstly I would look at your water quality, if fish are happy they are normally pretty resistant to most diseases (just like humans are far more prone to getting sick when they are run down, or in a poor environment). I assume your tank has been setup long enough (at least a month) to be completely cycled, and has enough filtering etc? Do a few large (50%) water changes a couple of times a week, with good aged water to get the quailty up. If you don't have test kits to check you water most pets shops will test it for you, i.e. if you have high NO2 your filter isn't working well enough or you tank isn't cycled, if you have high NO3 you need to change more water to remove it. Secondly go and get the correct treatment for white spot and an anti-fungal treatment, I'm not sure if it wise to treat both at the same time, I would do the fin rot first cause it looks pretty bad, plus fish can have a pretty bad dose of whitspot before it kills them. When you treat for white spot raise the tank temp to 28-29 degree's. Whitspot has a life cycle, only part of which is on the fish, and they can only be killed while they and going from fish to your gravel. Raising the temp speeds up this cycle making it more likely you will kill them all.

Sounds to me like you have an air leak either in the inlet hose or the cannister seal.

Fully agree with Alan, holes would be a pain every time you wanted to open or remove the top.

I run two cannister filters, IMHO there are so many plus, that if you can afford to you would be mad not to. Redundancy, Can be cleaned one at a time, to save bacteria 1 can be moved to second tank if needed Water movement depends on your setup, for a tank that size I think it would be very unlikely it would be a problem of too much, if it is just direct the filter output at the back corner.

I think the fact that 99+% of tanks are made from glass says it all. I have only ever seen one proper tank made from acrylic, it was my fathers and was a pain in the butt, it came apart a couple of times (which might have been poor workmanship) plus as it got older the acrylic (I assume this was what it was made from) went opaque.

I had similar problems with a few of my fish a few years ago, tried all sorts of treatments, even went to the vet and got some antibiotics. They had problems swimming (just sat round alot), poor color, did eat ok, started getting fat bellies. In the end I discovered that it was intestinal (sp?) worms, some of them died before I treated them for worms but the rest lived long healthy lives. The ones that died took 3-4 months to die, I guess the worms were eating all the food that the fish had eaten so that even through they looked fat, they wasted away. To treat for worms, dog worming tablet ground into their food works.

Found melafix to be really good for wounds etc. As humming bird says it really depends on what you are trying to treat and your tank setup. For example copper based solutions will kill snails, I like snails for keeping my tank clean so don't like to use copper. Also if you look at most brands they are one of or a mix of the same 3 or 4 chemicals, so IMHO the brands aren't that important just the price per mil for the chemical that your looking for.