Recent content by smkooq

Since you said you filled your new tank up with water from your cycled tank. It would be hard to reflect how far you are in your cycle in the new tank. Assuming your cycled tank water had nitrates in I would think you are receiving the nitrates from the cycled tank water. (Dont confuse nitrate...

I remember switching from large chunky gravel to a finer small gravel in my 220 gal tank. Not fun at all! How i did it was drain most of the water from the 220 to my spare tanks I had and transferred the decor/fish/filter to the tanks and had it running while i worked on changing the...

My panda cories swim up and down and along the glass of my tanks and even against the current of my filter outlet majority of their time, and they shoal together on the substrate and decors when scavenging for food.

Makes some caves with slates where the gaps are, I think that would give it a nice touch up

Dumbest thing i've heard.. First off there are plenty of these "Fish keeping EXPERT hobbyist people" As so they would call themselves, that started off knowing as much as a 2 year old about fish keeping. And classifying this hobby of keeping fish for intelligent people? I'm hoping is a joke...

my bn pleco tends to munch on his algae wafer for 5 or so minutes then goes running off, in which my other fishes in the tank start to nibble at the wafer. After a while when i check up on the progress of the wafer i will find the bn pleco back on the wafer munching away.

well if you have a freshwater tank and love bottom dwellers plecos are definitely a must have. All my plecos are going strong and there the ones i bought when i first started this hobby (7+ years). Easy to maintain, just get them some wafers, and blanch some veggies for them to feed on. You...

what kind of substrate are you using? If your using sand you could try putting the new water in, in a way where it doesnt disturb the sand too much. If you have gravel it could be you need to gravel vac more but even then the filter should clear up the debris pretty quick..

Your rocks could be the culprit in raising your ph. When i had tufa and lava rocks in one of my tanks my ph were reading from 7.8 to 8.0. Not sure what kind of rocks you have but they may be leeching metals/minerals in your water.

So is this a fresh new tank? If it is your ammonia is probably not going down from .25ppm with water changes because you have chloramines in the water. As long as your water conditioner detoxes chloramines your fine at .25ppm. I would not change the water unless your ammonia readings rise to...

And as far as keeping discus goes and using r/o water. You should test the hardness of your tap water and treat the water appropriately such as mixing in your tap with r/o water to make it softer if your city has very hard water.

r/o water a.k.a Reverse Osmosis, is pretty much filtered water that should be used for marine tanks not freshwater tanks. As for your fish-in cycle you dont necessarily want to aim for 0ppm of ammonia the whole time otherwise you could end up just starving/stalling your cycle. just think of...

Well with fish-in cycling i wouldn't be worried about .25ppm of ammonia. Once you start seeing levels rise above .5ppm is when you should start worrying. Prime wont cause any problems when building your beneficial bacteria either.

it usually starts building up like that when your not getting enough surface agitation. And when i say surface agitation i mean actually breaking the surface not just creating ripples. So if you lower your water level (if you have a HOB filter) so the water fall breaks the surface then that...

wet spot in portland has some stuff you should check out