Moving an "inherited" 20 gallon tank

[sdrone]

It has an "Elite 20" power filter that seems pretty quiet. She had a spare filter cartridge.

It has a 100w heater.

I'll post pics of the fish later. She calls 2 of them silver dollar fish, and if I look that up on google yeah, that's what they are.

Didn't get a good pic of what she calls the "sucker fish" that's supposed to beat algae. It's larger than I thought, several inches long and didn't really like the light. Brown, with some dark brown or black spots.

 

[WhiteDevil]

what day are you moving it, SD?

I moved a 75g from lake in the hills to crystal lake last tuesday. it was warmer then, I just put the fish in 5g buckets with an air stone and lid, sat them on a towel on an inside wall with no breeze, temp only dropped a total of 6 degrees in 6 hours they were in there. All are well, the big pleco can be seen at corbins in marengo.

 

[sdrone]

Looks like they are busy due to homecoming weekend, so my guess is Sunday. Temp is 69 tomorrow; fish will only be outside for 10m anyway while I walk 'em over here.

 

[WhiteDevil]

65 on sunday. that wont be bad, wrap a towel around em when outside.
what town are you in? im close to elgin.

 

[sdrone]

Here are pics of the fish... yeah, their tank is messy.

 

[sdrone]

Baseline test results are:

PH = 6.4
Ammonia = 0.5
Nitrite = 0
nitrate = 160ppm. i might have gotten an extra drop or 2 of tester in there.

 

[WhiteDevil]

better then the ones I got, before I started to drain it, I ran the tests it was 0-0-0 and ph was 4.3 my jaw hit the floor, fish were in excellent health and huge.

nice fish though. they need a much larger tank then a 20g sorry to say.

 

[sdrone]

well, the fish are moved. Their water is a LOT cleaner now, though not as clean as I'd like.

Turns out they got this tank back in May; apparently their daughters gave up on maintenance pretty quickly. There was a TON of old food in the tank. I ended up using only as much of their old water as it took to cover the sand for an inch or 2.

I'm gonna go ahead and get a new filter; I don't trust this filter and how gunked up it might be.

The Quikrete medium sand worked great. Very little cloudiness. The pleco sloshes it around with his tail sometimes, but no biggie.

Heater seems a bit funny; temp is good now. Hopefully it's not too hot when I check in the morning.

 

[Wy Renegade]

How where things this morning?

 

[sdrone]

Fish seemed fine. The gourami looks bigger. hahah.

The temp is sitting at 78.2, so the temp in the tank didn't go up even though the "heat on" light seems to be lit most of the time. I dropped the heater a notch this morning so I'll check the temp when I get home (thermostat is currently set at 75).

Gourami eats well, but the silver dollar fish didn't come near the surface for food. I dunno if I should pick up algae tablets for the pleco or not. I can tell that it smacked some sand around overnight. Gonna do a water test tonight.

 

[sdrone]

By the way - a big thanks to you and everyone on the board for the suggestions and help. Things went smoothly (so far) and I've learned a lot in the past week.