169 replies to this topic

[JimmyTheFish]

Try checking out www.plantedtank.net/forums

There is some great info about dose rates for fertilizers, CO2 and kH generator along with heaps of other info regarding algae, plants, lighting, etc.

A great additional resource on top of the knowledgable people on here!

[Brett]

Hi Waruna, glad to hear things are going well.

pH drops can result from many factors, but tannins from your wood and acids from the substrate are the two most likely.
As you have done, you can buffer these chemicals with carbonates, or remove them with various products, but I prefer just to change the water till it all settles down.

The falling carbonate hardness usually relates to chemical reactions with other salts (either in the water column or the substrate), producing insoluble carbonates (like calcium carbonate) that just precipitate out of the water column.

Cheers
Brett

[waruna]

Hi Brett,

I'm pretty sure it's AS and the wood too, i've been keeping an eye on the levels everyday. A few suggested (Including Paul from Morley) to use Seachem Alkaline buffer, it seems it's much more stable than some others on the market. I'm going to use some tomorrow and see if it's going to make a difference. Thanks for your help, it's much appreciated . You keep this thread going lol

Moved around a few plants before roots get too long/strong. Co2 system is finally in Perth after almost five weeks, will be delivered tomorrow

[Brett]

Hi Waruna,

We are getting into the realms of my own personal bias. Most of the fish I have kept are "soft" water fish, so I am always concious of minimising the amount of "stuff" I add to the water. My preference is always to remove chemicals from the water rather than add further chemicals.

Hence my suggestion on water changes, removing the chemical laden water (tannins, nitrates, salts, etc ) and replacing it with water with less chemicals in it. This is usually refered to as "total dissolved solids".

There is a down side to this, you have "soft" water that doesn't buffer pH changes too well, so you need to be careful about stocking, water changes, fertilisers, CO2 and the like. It is all a balance really, but it particularly important for wild caught fish that are accustomed to very soft waters.

I have gone a bit off thread

Cheers
Brett

[tha_krust]

i need to get me some of that wood

[waruna]

Hi Brett, i have been doing regular water changes, it's slowly getting there. My KH is at 4 now, PH at 6.8. In regards to wild caught fish, from what i understand they seem to get bacterial/parasitic infections easily when they are placed in “hard” water conditions. The reason for this is most of these parasites are not found in the soft waters these fish comes from. I haven't read anything to say that having a UV will completely isolate this problem but there's a lot of info out there to confirm that when you run a good UV sterilization system they can be kept in much harder water conditions than what they are used to.

I'm still not planning on keeping them anything higher than 3 to 4KH and 6.8PH. I think the most important thing is to slowly condition these fish to the levels i have. Like you and a few pointed out they don't like sudden changes. Discus will be here on Tuesday, if i'm not completely happy with the water quality at the end of this weekend i'm going to ask them to hold them in QLD for another week.

My Corys arrived on Wednesday and have settled in very nicely, lost one in transit, poor fella. Over night they managed to go through the whole top layer of the substrate looking for food and turning my crystal clear water very murky, hmm! And it's still murky a bit after two days!

Finally i got my C02 system, they Bl@#dy forgot to send my PH controller, luckily i can still run the system without it, but it would have been nice to have the complete system NOW!

Here's a pic of the CarbonDoser electronic C02 regulator


Basically it's fully automatic, electronic. No bubble counter, LED light flashes every time a bubble is released. No Solenoid, no needle valve (timing of the bubbles is fully electronic). I'm running a bubble per every two seconds. I can also control the size of the bubbles, i'm running it at 10.5psi. The size of the bubbles can vary from system to system. If you have a low pressure system say 1000L an hour (output) you could set the bubble size to a much smaller size, pressure at around 5 or 6psi. Because i'm running a 5000L an hour pump i need to put more pressure so it can push the bubbles through to the reactor, so in this case bigger bubbles. This in turn will increase or decrease the bubbles per second ratio. If you have a PH controller you don't have to worry about anything like this. Hope that makes sense?!

This is the inline Co2 reactor. There is a small pump in the middle of the reactor which creates a turbulence of the water and it completely dissolves C02 before it is released.



It's so good to finally run the whole system

Cheers.

[Brett]

Looks a great system, having a pH controller certainly takes the guess work out of it.


Cheers
Brett

[waruna]

Got the Discus today, here's a quick pic, didn't want to get too close to them.. Still very shy. trying to get them to eat some food now:-) All six light units on!

[Wet Dreams]

From a fellow planted tank nut that looks awesome!
Absolute top quality discus, really make the tank and set it off. Will be watching the progress of the tank and also the discus.

[Brett]

Very impressive

Cheers
Brett

[fabcondo71]

wow im jealous , what a setup
i'll keep dreamin

[Fish Antics]

Very Nice Waruna. Love the discus! when are the Altums comming??

[ibm450]

JESUS !!!! what a setup...... one of the best setups ive seen for a while...wow, very slick...you should YouTube your setup ;-)

[fish]

great looking discus mate

[waruna]

Thank you very much for the comments guys

Fish Antics Posted Mar 19 2011, 12:20 AM
Very Nice Waruna. Love the discus! when are the Altums comming??

Mate i kind of put that idea (Altums) to a side for the time being. My comments below will explain why

Ok an update. I had a bit of a drama the past few days. Black beard algae drama. It started off very slowly and all of a sudden there were quite a bit of it. I think this happened for a few reasons. For the first week or so i only had the lights on, then after almost two weeks i got my Co2 system, then after a week i started fertilizing. This would have been a very slow process for the plants to establish themselves and start growing, and to start using all the nutrients properly. The other reason is i didn't have enough surface agitation, big mistake. I spent so much time trying to perfect distribution of Co2, lighting, filtration etc but didn't put any time researching on sufficient dissolved O2 levels in the tank. I lost one Otocinclus and one Bleading heart to this reason and had everyone sort of struggling for O2. Luckily i picked this up before it was too late. Still two dead fish is too many.

When i started fertilizing on Thursday i've got a good feeling that the plants are starting to "live" normally, what i mean is taking up O2 at night time. I didn't have much surface agitation and therefore wasn't enough O2 to go around at night time. I think this is why slowly over a period of two days the levels dropped considerably. Lesson learnt, not enough O2 means fish and plants suffer/die, and not enough surface agitation traps all the gases (also this affect O2 levels) produced by decaying organic matter (also from AS) which will lead to algae problems.

I already had a Tunze circulation pump running in the tank, all it took was to point it at the surface, just enough to break the surface. I found a great thread while i was researching so if any one here is not sure this should give you an idea what to aim for:
http://www.aquaticpl...-agitation.html

It was amazing to see a difference in fish straight away. For my tank one pump is not enough so i'm going to add another 1000l pump so both ends of the tank are covered.

I started using "Olivers Blend" fertilizers (Aquotix), still trying to work out the correct ratios, it will be a while i think. I've started reading up on fertilizer dosages, signs of deficiencies etc. Would love to hear everyones experiences

There's still a bit of BBA in the tank. After hearing and reading so many reports on Seachem Flourish getting rid of BBA i gave it a try yesterday. lots of people recommended over-dosing 5 times, i only did one and a half dose. Even at this dose rate all my Corys, Otocynclus and whiptail cat fish started to “climb the trees”.. I mean all of them were on the wood close to the surface, i was very scared! It took them almost a day to start acting normal again (going through the gravel looking for food constantly). My Discus on the other hand had no affect to this what so ever. For the first time i saw the more dominant ones "head butt" others. I think they were really enjoying the good supply of O2 in the tank.

Today is the first day in almost a week that i have not seen any new BBA grow in my tank.

I think Flourish definitely had an affect on BBA. I also think having a good water flow on the top layer also definitely contributed to this. I'm going to continue using Flourish at the recommended dosages, daily. BTW i filled a 25ml syringe with Flourish and sprayed it over the BBA, this is what Michael from Seaview aquariums suggested.


For the time being i'm not going to look for any Altums, i think this is the best thing i should do. I'm going to concentrate on getting the right nutrient balance for the plants i have. And when the algae problem is gone and when i can clearly see all plants are doing well i'll think about the Altums.

Also i've had mixed emotion about adding Altums since i've got the Discus. I've been thinking a lot about if i have enough space to have a group of Altums. What does everyone think? Discus seem to be in a group 24/7, there's so much room left, but what if they decided to go solo one day?! lol. Then again if a supplier calls me and say "hey do you still want your Altums?!" not sure if i'll say NO! Don't get me wrong i'd love to get them and space is the biggest concern!

[Juls]

As I said before I'd consider only discus or only altums.

Those discus you got are utterly stunning.

You should also consider that the angels could carry parasites or disease that does not effect the angels but will lead to the death of your discus.

Given that both the altums and your discus either could be wild caught making it all the more likely.

If you only kept the discus you could get 60-100 rummy nose tetras (get the bleheri variant) which would look amazing as they will school constantly and tightly back and forth up and down the tank not a option with big altums.

The upside of rummys is there noses tell u when everything is good, if anything is wrong they lose the orange from there noses.

(cardinals on the other hand will just sift through the whole tank one by one seldom holding a school)

It's looking awesome anyway love those discus very jealous.

Juls

[JimmyTheFish]

Waruna,

Very nicely done mate. The CO2 set-up is quite cool, but be assured the tank plants, etc will take time to sort itself out. When I first set my planted tank up I had algae issues (blue green, brown filamentous, black beard). All seem to be a natural progression while your plants get established and start using the nutrients up faster and outcompeting the algae. So your black beard algae won't disappear overnight. I've found spot dosing with excel is the easiest way to keep it in check. I've had my tank going for 9 months and overtime the algae has become less of a nuisance and I expect one day it will be nearly eradicated.

Have you considered a foreground plant as cover? I would definitely recommend some Echinodorus tennellus. I have some in my tank and it grows nice and tight and looks brilliant. Unlike other ground covers, it grows up off the substrate so fish like your Corydoras can still forage in, under and around the plants. I think it would look very cool in your tank.

Never been a huge discus fan, mostly due to the godiness (my opinion only) of all the mutations , but having said that wild discus are amazing and your group are stunners. Worth every penny I reckon. I have Cardinals in my tank and like Juls said they shoal more than school, so rummy's make look nicer in a more open spaced tank like yours.

NICE!

[waruna]

Hi Juls, i already have about 35 Bleading heart Tetras in the tank, another 60 schooling fish would be too many wouldn't it? Just so you know i'm taking all the advice about adding Altums on board Well i was hoping that the UV would kill those parasites, anyway i don't think i'll find any in a hurry. Don't get me wrong i absolutely love these Discus, i'm finding it really hard to convince myself not to get any Altums. It's hard!

Hi Jimmy, I have about 12 Blyxa atm, they are still pretty small. I'm hoping they would separate gravel area at the front of the tank from all the plants, this is the look i'm hoping to get. Not sure how they will go, i'm looking for more but they are hard to come by.

I did think about getting some Echinodorus tennellus, they tend to take over and cover the whole bottom area tho, personally i think it looks nice when there's an open area showing gravel. I'll have a look at more tanks with tennellus and see if there is a way to control it. You are absolutely right, to me there's no beauty in "Hollywood style" Discus as Kevin would say If i was going for color i would have setup another SW tank!

So far my fish list:

24 x Corys
6 x Otocyclus
1 x Long Nose Whiptail
1 x Royal Whiptail
1 x Farlowella Catfish
35 x Bleading Heart Tetras
12 x Green Tefe Discus

Comments welcome

[Juls]

If u can find them redline torpedo barbs might work, maybe 10-16 ish of them as they reach 4-6" long,

Vebas had some last year, where $40 a piece from memory. Never seen them with discus though, usually pair up with altums well.
Not sure if there size and constant movement wouldn't upset the discus though.

The bleeding heart tetras may be aggressive towards other smaller tetras so maybe the rummys wouldn't work.

You may have already noticed the bleeding hearts are aggressive feeders, If ANY of your discus show "Any" Signs of weekness
don't be surprised if your pack of bleeding hearts all go into kamakazi attack mode and finish it off.

Lol the more I think about it the harder it gets,

we went with bleeding hearts so they would be big and robust enough for the altums, but now we have the incredible discus and considering not getting the altums and the bleeding hearts might now be a bit "overkill".

can you see more clearly now what i was trying to get at with the angels and discus thing? I've only seen it work on "temporary" displays, like tanks heiko and others have setup for certain shows, but are only a temporary display.

Juls

Edited by Juls, 21 March 2011 - 08:28 PM.

[Brett]

Hi Waruna,

Sorry to hear you hit some algea problems, but they are pretty much manditory with new tanks.

I wrote about my experiences with Excell some time back, you can read it at this link

Surface agitation increase the oxygen levels in your tank, are you suggesting that your fish were suffering from lack of oxygen, as if this was the case increasing the fish load is likely to be a problem. The beauty of pH controlled CO2, is that increasing surface agitation just means that you pump more CO2 into the water to keep up with the increased loss.

A good guide to when your plants have settled in and started to grow well is "pearling". With that level of light and CO2 you would expect to see some of the plants starting to pearl if the balance of nutrients is right.
Its still early and I wouldn't be too quick to resort to the chemical warfare, a lot of these algea phases just correct themselves.

Cheers
Brett