Home Fish Aquarium Guide

I purchased a bottle of Kordon Rid-Metals during my quest to determine why anacharis always melted in my tank. We have a house with older copper pipes and the familiar blue-green stains in the tub from water. Test kits reveal that the first water out of the tap tends to be around 0.5 ppm of copper. Since anacharis and some of our other aquarium plants are copper sensitive (and I’m hoping to add some shrimp at some point) I decided to try to treat the problem and see if that helped the plants growth.

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Okay – yesterday Billie was looking quite plump. Starting to look a bit squared. I really was expecting another week yet based on when she and Mickey were first together, but…. This morning we had fry. When I first got up and looked, she looked a bit thinner than yesterday. I looked and looked and finally found a little baby fry zipping around. We had either 4 or 5. Twice I thought I was able to count 5 in the tank. This evening I’ve only been able to spot 3 at a time. We do have a lot of plant cover including some floating water sprite which they’re currently hunkered down in. mom looks thinner, but…. still a bit plump. I’m suspecting there may be a few more fry to drop.

Continue Reading “Platy Fry! (Again)”

Our first fish tank. I don’t know exactly how long it’s been. It was probably around 1998 or so. Aquarium information was hard to come by online still. I remember at one point during that nightmare thinking I should get a book, but didn’t know where to start. We had always liked looking at the fish at the wal-mart in town. Years ago we looked at fish in a pet store that was in the mall in town. It was just part of our routine. One night though – they had a sale on 5 gallon tank kits. It included “everything you need” to start and was 30-40 dollars I think. We bit at the offer and took it home. It was a hex tank and just fit on our bookshelf in the hallway. It was a tight fit getting the light cover off to add water, but it was manageable. The tank has a rim around the top as well so you can’t get to the entire surface, but…. well why would we need to get at it too much?

I don’t think we got fish that night. We did get gravel though and two bright neon decorations – cave and mountain.

Continue Reading “An Aquarium Horror Story – aka our first Tank”

So, I now have this 10 gallon Walstad Natural planted tank. I have a homemade sponge filter powered by an air pump. Technically planted tanks shouldn’t need much in the way of a filter although I’m starting to think about a canister filter just in case. It would give water movement and probably be quieter than the air bubble that is pushing the sponge filter.

So, I’ve been looking at the low end canisters. There is the PX-360: Finnex All-in-one Compact Canister Filter over at amazon.com for about $40. It comes with a hanger to hang it on the outside of the tank. It also seems fairly well rated. Another low end canister is the well rated Zoo Med 501 Turtle Canister Filter for about $35, but it doesn’t come with the hanger – that is separate: Zoo Med 501 Canister Filter Hanger for about $8.

I haven’t ordered anything yet, I’m leaning towards the PX-360 if I were to get one.

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So, with the recent batch of fry it’s pushed us over the edge towards getting a new tank. I had already decided that the next setup I did would be a natural planted tank. Plastic plants just aren’t my style and the high tech approach to fertilizers and estimating which nutrients to add, co2 generators/etc.etc…. is too high maintenance for my taste. So here’s what I put together today. 10 gallon Top Fin tank and hood from petsmart. Tetra whisper 20 air pump. An old sponge filter I had laying around (not necessary, but I’m using it to help settle the cloudiness in the water. I had a huge bag of garden pro potting soil which I filtered out to use as the soil and laid down about an inch. On the edges I used the black gravel that they had at petsmart (probably topfin brand. A 100 watt topfin aquarium heater. Marineland plant/daylight bulb (10 watt)/ air check valve and an old thermometer from our other tank. We had some tubing. I also picked up an amazon sword plant, anubias, and wisteria to try out. We already had a boatload of anacharis, some java fern and lots of java moss.

Continue Reading “New 10 Gallon Walstad Natural Planted Tank setup”

This post is going to be a collection of notes and thoughts on the natural planted tanks ( or walstad natural planted tanks.) I have recently run across this approach and am really interested in giving it a try and likely will give it a try with the new 10 gallon tank. Some interesting initial notes on the concept are as follows: potting/topsoil and then gravel to hold that down. This is going to be a heavily planted tank. Cycling should not be an issue if it’s heavily planted enough. Filtration is also something that may not need to be done unless wanted for better filtering or water circulation. Lighting can be natural sunlight if situated near a window or artificial. Water changes will likely need to be infrequent. (6 months? from what I read.) Now this is appealing on several levels including the obvious lazy tank owner level…. but the concept behind it is a bit more interesting to me.

Continue Reading “A Walstad Natural Planted Tank”

The first part of this is taken from my “Why are my plants melting” post and updates…

1-7-11 – 10:30pm
Well, I was starting to vacuum the gravel and caught sight of a little white flake of food floating up towards the siphon when it suddenly darted down…. we have babies. I saw 4 at one time and then a 5th being born and there still seem to be a few to go (at least.) Snoopy, our red wag (red-orange body with black tail and fins) is giving birth. She had been a bit cranky the last week or so chasing the other two around (a bit moreso today it seemed.) She is the one I suspected was pregnant just based on her size. We added Mickey (a male) into the tank on Tuesday December 21st. Prior to that Snoopy had been a solitary female since around this time last year I believe (I’ll have to look back, but I think she may have been in there a bit longer.)

Continue Reading “Baby Platy Fry”

(sigh)… The adventures never end with your home fish aquarium do they? First you have the break in period of the tank. Cycling your fish, monitoring ammonia, nitrite and nitrates daily watching for signs that they are in danger or that the tank has cycled. At this point in time we have two platys in our tank. It’s small (5 gallons), but they do seem happy. I would like to move them up to a 10 gallon or larger tank, but at the moment that’s not going to happen. Water parameters? 0 ppm ammonia, 0ppm nitrites and 0ppm nitrates. It doesn’t matter when I test, how I test, everything is always zero. (There must be something wrong I hear you saying….) No, we have been trying to keep live plants in the aquarium and they are using up all the available nitrates. Java Moss, Java Fern and Filligree Frill were the first plants, then an amazon sword and anacharis, then I tried anacharis again. Recently I’ve added water sprite. Each time, they seem to do okay for a bit, but with the exception of the java fern and java moss (which lately is buried under algae…. everything else collapses. The anacharis just melted over several days twice, the filligree fell apart and died, so did the water sprite.

Continue Reading “Why Are all my Plants Melting?”

I’ve seen warnings with many fish and plants that are packaged and sold for the home aquarium. They warn about not releasing these plants or fish into the wild. Now, I can see why some people might release a certain fish into a pond because it had a good appetite for mosquitos for instance. But, wouldn’t you think you should check and see if that kind of fish is already native to your area?

Continue Reading “Responsible Fish Keeping”

I have to report a follow up to the LAST confessional I had about our fish tank being very dirty. It seems every time I do a water change we will get an algae bloom within a couple days. Algae collects on the tank surfaces and then the water clears. I’ve pretty much left it when it does this until the next cleaning as our fish seems happy and content. The basic water parameters (ammonia/nitrite/nitrates) all seem at negligible levels. I’m still surprised that the nitrates are staying near zero and still assuming that the plant growth we have (and yes algae too likely) are keeping it that low. I can’t help but wonder if our well water is responsible for the algae blooms (phosphates?). So… how do you go about cleaning a VERY dirty tank?

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