Recent content by Ingy

Green water is not harmful to the fish as it's a natural biological process happening. Green water has one major concern tho. It's ugly. On the other hand it means algae is consuming all the nitrogens (from ammonia to nitrate) in a natural and safe manner which is why your levels are at zero...

They won't get along. The Betta will attack the guppies to death. Literally. I have a 110 gal tank and 1 betta and 2 male guppies fought. I pulled the betta before he killed a guppy, but just. The guppy is still recovering and betta has a home in the sump.

And you have no plants or other nitrate removers? How heavily stocked is your tank? My nitrates are 0 in a heavily stocked 110 gal tank. Very few water changes at all, but well planted.

A cycle should take about 6 weeks. Dr Tims can cause a false cycle, where free swimming bacteria can consume all the nitrogens without settling on the surfaces where they should. You think the cycle is very quickly done, and you don't wait for the bacteria to properly colonize, and you end up...

When I look at the color of the tank water , it looks like a weak brownish tea color. That looks like the tannins leaching out of the wood. Having soaked it for 3-4 days would do little too. When you did soak it, do you remember if the water colored? If it is the wood, I wouldn't worry at...

IMHO water changes are the most promoted, useless forms of nitrate control. Think about it. A 25% WC is more accurately known as leaving 75% of the nitrates in the tank. So each week your leaving most of the nitrates in the tank to accumulate. Eventually the levels of nitrate will rise until...

When I first started reading, I thought what is the problem. Ammonia is great to have during s cycle. Then, much later on I saw you had fish in there. Crap. A 50% water change at 8ppm ammonia (an extremely highly toxic level) means half the ammonia is left behind. That's 4ppm, a very toxic...

I must be missing something. Your pH is 6.5. That is well below the green you're looking for with the drop checker. The solutions I've seen always change at 7.2.

There's obviously something in the water, probably from the sand. A significant water change is needed as your O2 exchange at the surface is completely eliminated.

Add a dark backdrop to the tank to make colours pop. Corrugated plastic cardboard cut to size is perfect. Dark colours work best (compared to the white wall behind there now)

Plants. They use nitrates to grow.

Before you put the rocks in the tank, put egg crate on the bottom (before sand, or work it down through it). Other wise the larger rocks can crack the bottom glass.

When doing a fish-in cycle, you're creating a very small BB population as you ammonia and nitrite levels are never allowed to climb very high. This means, when those levels finally reach 0 again, you can only add a small number of fish to the system (I'd recommend 1/2 of what you already have)...

Garnet (sand blasting media) and quartz (pool filter sand) are both silica based minerals. What does that mean? Nothing more than the fact that glass is also a silica based mineral. None of them are going to leach silica into the water coloum unless your water becomes extremely acidic (i.e...

As this is a new aquarium, your nitrates are likely very high (even with some aggressive water changes after the cycle). That means your plants are not able to consume all the nitrates and algae forms. Lowering your pH level will slow the growth of the algae without harming the plants. But...