Recent content by sir_dudeguy

The hardware

Ok thanks! What fert tabs would you recommend? Oh, another thing. I'm getting a free 75g tank from my boss on monday. However i'm gonna be using it for a chinese water dragon...basically a paludarium, in which there may be 5-10g of water. What submersible filter would be good for 5-10g...

yes, the elephant nose do prefer solitude. They "school" when young, and brake off on their own when older, i remember now :) I also remembered that i saw some weird fact that they have the largest brain to body size ratio out of any animal or something like that...i think they were behind only...

I wont add the little pygmy puffer, he's a mean punk lol. But those SA puffers i had were completely harmless to everything else in the tank. They reminded me of puppies the way they'd swim around and follow you around the tank begging for food :) I was also thinking of cutting the tetra...

Ok, i've been out of freshwater stuff for i'd say 3 years now...i only have saltwater now (and i should update my profile to reflect what i have :) ) Anyways, i just kinda wanted to "remember" all the stuff about freshwater, seeing as i kinda wanna start one up again and i just started working...

like said above, its pretty much up to you. If you want to go with more base than live, it will be cheaper but just take a bit longer. Eventually (within a few months) its all the same anyways, so it really wont matter in the end as long as you take everything slowly (which you should do anyways)

skimmers will generally aerate the water plenty on its own IME. Do not, however, use the venturi thing on a lot of powerheads...that will give you salt creep like none other (and same goes for air stones/bubblers...too much salt creap). Also, if you use either of those, you're gonna have bubbles...

how much media did you use from another tank? If you used all the media from another tank, you may not see much of a nitrite spike. And is this tank planted at all? If so, that could be another reason...they eat up nutrients before they show up. But just keep waiting...back when i did...

kinda. it wont really be a mini cycle, but you do have to wait about 2 or so weeks in between adding fish (and i dont count stuff like neon tetras and little fish like that....they're just so small) to allow for the bacteria to bounce back. But if you plant the tank heavily enough, you'll...

idk how the 75's are...they always seemed kinda narrow like the 55's to me too...but i never really looked at em much. I strongly recommend the 40 breeders tho. They're smallish so they dont take up a lot of room, but you'd be surprised what you can fit in there due to the ground space (which is...

ya you got a point there i guess. Like say you're starting...oh...a 55 gallon tank... Generally you'd want to go for like at least 6w per gallon of PC lighting right? and then you look at how tall it is and adjust your lighting from there. If its only 12 inches tall (that'd be a weird 55 tho...

i really hate the 55's. I loved the lenght of mine, but they're so narrow that it is really really hard to get good rockwork in there. You almost cant realy build upwards (because you need bigger pieces on the bottom which are just too wide for the tank to look good with) and you pretty much...

watts per gallon is a horrible rule to go by tho imo. For example 100 watts of pc lights compaired to 100 watts of metal halides...theres no comparison lol. The MH is going to be waaaay stronger. It penetrates more water, meaning that you could keep stuff all the way at the bottom. Where pc's...

ya what fishfreek said...except i hated the stuff. It blocked so much light for me so i just ditched it and built a fish-proof canopy

ya hirocks is gone. And i hear that they werent so great either. They apparently had HORRIBLE customer service (people wouldnt hear from them for a month...no emails, calls..nothing...then the rock shows up one day..probably after they went and spent money elsewhere half the time lol) And the...