First tank (planted), asking for advice on fish-in cycle and everything else too

[tedd4u]

First tank (planted), asking for advice on fish-in cycle and everything else too

Hi - I'm new to the forum but I've read a ton of helpful stuff here from the pros and been inspired by some of the newbies.

I'm going to give you story in a nutshell of how I ended up where I am today, what my tank looks like, what's in it, what's happening with the cycle and then write a little about my specific concerns and questions. I'd love to hear your comments, suggestions and advice.

First some pics (on Flickr): Flickr: Nano planted tank.

The story
Basically what happened was this. My son won a goldfish at the county fair. It's nearly impossible to get the ping pong balls in there so I let him try but woe is me, he managed to do it this year. We put the goldie (nice fish) in a 1.5G glass cookie jar with the basic Tetra stuff from the mega chain pet store. I killed so many goldfish as a kid that I wanted to make sure we treated this guy right, so I started studying how to do things properly. I saw all the ADA stuff on the internet and got turned on to that, so I also wanted to do a planted tank. I soon learned that a goldfish is a bad choice for us since a) we only really have room for a small tank and b) goldies would eat most of the plants I'm interested in keeping.

So, long and short of it is, goldie is up for adoption and I have this nice 2.5 gal tank with some plants set up doing a fish-out cycle for 3 weeks. I'm was at a local fish store this weekend and I saw some nice golden white cloud mountain minnows and amano shrimp sharing a tank. Emboldened by jetajockey's article ("Fish in cycling: step over into the dark side") I decided to go for it. I'm okay with frequent water changes if needed for several weeks. I brought home one minnow and one shrimp. (By the way there's been a snail in there for over a week now and he seems healthy. Came in with some of the plants.)

So now, I have a tank that's partway through fish-out cycle with fish in and plants. I didn't measure the tank until just before putting minnow and shrimp in so the measurements start just a little over 24 hours ago.

Here are my measurements
(link to spreadsheet of test data on Google docs: Nano tank test data)

Time            pH   Ammonia  Nitrite  Comment
9/8/2012 18:30  7    4        0.125    Water and plants have been in for 10 days, filter for 4 days. Some crypt leaves are melting. Snail has been alive in tank for 7 days.
9/8/2012 20:30	 6.8  2        0        After 40% water change
9/9/2012 00:30	 6.8  1        0        After another 50% water change. Added 1 minnow and 1 shrimp.
9/9/2012 09:45	 6.6  2        0.125    Overnight
9/9/2012 11:05	 6.8  0.75     0.05     After 50% water change. Used Arrowhead because it's got 0ppm ammonia.
9/9/2012 16:00	 6.8  1        0.125    Added 5 drops of Prime after this test.

Notes:

• All along I've been doing a quarter cap of Microbe-Lift Special Blend every other day.
• The tank is not heated. Our house temp hits a low of 66F at 3am and usually doesn't go over 70F.
• No air or CO2 bubbler.
• Before the fish went in, I cut the sprayer bar to half length and turned it to shoot from below at the surface to get surface agitation. It seemed pretty intense for the fish so currently I've taken out the sprayer bar and I'm shooting the filter output along the back wall of the tank. There's less agitation but probably less oxygen.
• My current plan is test ph/ammonia/nitrite AM and PM and do a 20-40% water change whenever ammonia or nitrite goes over .5 ppm.

Nitrogen cycle
Really I am new to this but here's my interpretation. I'm hoping some pros can tell me if I'm off the mark or just crazy.

1. There is a strong source of ammonia in the tank. I'm thinking it may be decaying plant matter (maybe the crypt parv which I trimmed this morning). I haven't been feeding much at all. A half a goldfish flake every other day.
2. There must be some beneficial bacteria action because nitrite is non-zero and comes back after water changes. (I won't have a nitrate test kit until later in the week - so no nitrate data yet.)

Question: at this point am I better off sticking with the current fish-in cycle with water changes whenever ammonia or nitrite goes over .5 ppm or should I use a bottle of Tetra Safe Start (TSS) to try to race to the point of having all the bacterial capacity I need? (LFS guy suggested 1/4 of the small TSS bottle a day for 4 days.) One thing that I read about TSS is that you're not supposed to do water changes so I'm concerned about that. If I can't do water changes and TSS doesn't really work fast, how would I address any high ammonia or nitrite levels during TSS process? Prime? Ammo-lock?

pH / water treatment
A LFS advised me to use 1:1 ratio of Seachem Neutral Regulator and Seachem Discus Buffer targeting pH 6.8. Our tapwater here contains chloramine (and maybe also Cl2 gas). Just yesterday I read that these two Seachem products are phosphate based and should be avoided in a planted tank due to likelihood of the phosphorus creating an algae bloom.

I have some Seachem Prime now and plan to switch to that and use as little Discus Buffer as possible to get to pH 7.

Questions: Is that a good plan? I have also seen several people on internet forums suggest it's better to get fish acclimated to your tap pH, weaning off pH corrections over several days if needed. To the best of my knowledge my tap water is higher than 7.6 (I don't have a high-range pH test). It may be as high as 8 -- is it really advisable to try to keep a tank like this at pH 8?


substrate / fertilizers
The substrate is a plain bag of unmarked sand from the low-tech LFS (washed / rinsed first) with some root tablets. I also have a bottle of flourish (non-excel kind) and I'm doing 1mL / week (after a water change).

Questions: Is this sufficient? Are there other fertilization issues I need to consider? I see that Flourish also has a few macro variants (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium) -- how would I even know if I needed these? Are there test kits?

oxygen / carbon / light

Questions:

• Do I need an air pump & stone? What should I expect with or without one?
• Will I need Excel for these plants? (CO2 is not realistic for me at this time).
• I have a 27 watt Archea power compact 7200 K fluorescent lamp raised as high as it will go above the glass lid. It's a nice lamp but probably way overpower. Based on the guideline I've seen for low-tech planted tanks of 2 watts / gal I should have 5 watts. Any good suggestions for this? It seems like some small LED lamps might be about the right brightness but I haven't seen a good way to compare the output of fluorescent vs LED from the perspective of photosynthesis (i.e. 5 watts fluorescent is different than 5 watts LED).

If you've read this far, thanks! I'd really appreciate your comments, suggestions or advice.

--tedd4u

 

[tamtam]

I'm going to try to address everything I can and hopefully I won't forget anything.

First thing pops out is that your tank is rather small. TBH I don't think it is suitable for a whole lot. I wouldn't put a GWCMM in anything less than 10 gallons, you aren't going to be able to support a school of these in a 2.5 gal.

Have you tested your tap water yet? I would suggest testing it for a base line. Sometimes tap water will have nitrite, nitrate or ammo in it and it's always helpful to know if you have anything in your water. You may be doing water changes to try and get a level down but could really be adding to it. KWIM?

As for PH, don't mess with it. Use your Seachem PRIME, that's all you need really. A consistent PH is far more important than the number most often. Your fish will adjust as long as you are not keeping super sensitive fish. Using products to regulate it just bounce it up and down and causes a lot of unneeded stress on your fish. Though if it's really high I would suggest you get a high range kit to test just to be sure exactly where it is but unless it's way up there it should be fine. You can use driftwood to naturally lower the PH too. People on this board have PH as high as 8.1 and do just fine.


with levels above .5 ppm you will need to up the amount of water you change out. I would suggest a 50% if it's anything over .5 and personally I'd try to keep it lower, around .25 ppm. With such a small tank it's not hard for this to spike up with such a small water volume so the lower the levels the better.

I would forgo the safe start. It's widely debated on how good these products are. Some swear by them and others are against them. Personally I think you money would be better of else where. Forgoing water changes IMO is never a good idea.

Some of your levels may be coming from plant decomposition but TBH I don't think so. It's just a small tank and even though minnows are small fish with a rather small bioload I think you could probably expect to have some troubles maintaining water quality in this tank.

air stones are generally aesthetic but if you have your filter adjusted and there isn't a lot of surface movement you may want to think about adding a stone to get that moving. I guess it mostly comes down to really how much agitation there is and it's hard to say one way or the other without actually knowing what's going on with your tank.

I don't know a whole lot about lighting and plants so I'm really not too sure on that stuff and hopefully someone can chime in.

Also Welcome to AA!!