Recent content by jglover

Habrosus or hastatus cories, maybe panda cories. These are about the smallest cories put there.

Well that's a problem as nitrite is very toxic and should be a part of routine water quality testing. Just because there is no ammonia there still could be a nitrite spike.

Did they test for nitrite?

One dwarf gourami and a school of small tetras will work. As I said before, I've got a 10 gallon with one DG, five glowlights and four otos. It works out just fine but you have yokel your maintenance up and provide ample filtration. I run 30 gallons of filtration on my tank.

Albino, bronze and green are all the same species. C. aeneus. They get about 3 inches in length so they are really too big for a 10 gallon. Look at the dwarf cories, C. habrosus and C. hastatus as these guys stay at around a inch to an inch and a half. An alternative would be otos, but they are...

It's a different technology than the test strips. It is a gas exchange technology and is employed in the gas sensing industry as well. There are companies that make ammonia detection system based on this technology, that are routinely used as monitor for safety in refrigeration system. Same...

Also, be sure your ammonia stock is fresh. Ammonia solution are gaseous ammonia dissolved in water. Essentially ammonium hyroxide. Over time the ammonia will slowly out gas and/or react and oxidize away, so if the solution is older, it may not contain 25% ammonia.

How big a tank and how much ammonia solution are you adding? You have an ammonia concentration of 250,000 mg/l in your stock.....10ml of that solution would contain 2500 mg of ammonia. Put that 10ml into a 20 gallon tank would give you a concentration 2500mg/75l = 33 mg/l of ammonia......so to...

Your high nitrite level indicates the tank is not yet cycled. You will always see ammonium in your tank due to the water treatment but it should be in the neighborhood of .25 to .5. The high nitrite is the concern now, as it is much more toxic to aquatic life than ammonia. I'd be doing water...

About two months ago I got four otos from Petsmart. Two were dead in 24 hours. I exchanged them the next day and all four are now going strong. Oto stock is just hit or miss, if you make it past a couple of weeks, you should be good to go. Also, try to feed zucchini every week, mine love it.

There's not really a huge difference between the two. The ammonia alert is a semi-qualitative test, the API test is a semi-quantitative test while the chart is a calculation. All things considered, the chart should be the most accurate, provided your input data is good. I would imagine the...

You'll get about 50% more turnover from the AC30 than the AC20. I have an AC20 on my 10 gallon and it does produce quite a lot of current one one side of the tank. The guppies seem to enjoy it but it also looks hard for them to handle due to the longer fins. I usually keep it running at about...

No, the nitrate test is specifc for nitrate, it will not detect nitrite. Two totally different ionic species and reactivities. It is likley you could have some nitrate, where it comes from is hard to say. It could be from your source water or it could be contamination introduced by you, such as...

The bottom line for these stores is business and money. The corporate side is beholden to the stockholders to maximize the store profits, generally in whatever method that entails. It is something you see everywhere, nit just in the pet business. Look at the cutrent issues with GM and Toyota on...

No, run the two side by side. You have to let the new filter populate with bacteria from your old filter first.