oliverpool
Member
- Joined
- 10 Jun 2013
- Messages
- 32
I have a 4 year old tank. It previously had 5 cardinal (from ten 3 years ago), a few paros and a huge Starlight bristlenose and only java ferns as plants. I have been running some aquasoil using a matten filter covering the whole right side of a 20G tank. I recently just decided to do a rescape, change of lights and add a chiller as I wanted to grow anubias and Bucephalandra.
I vaccum the soil as best i could, and mistakenly vaccum all the "mulms?" behind my HMF (should have left them there), change my lights to one of the newer LED ones (running low at around 30% which should equal medium lights I guess), add as much buce and anubias on lava rocks and one drift that I would say the plants would almost cover 75% of the bottom surface if there was laid flat out. I also added floaters to cover at least 25% of the top. Water is pretty clear since it was set up 6 weeks or so ago. However. I gave away all the huge tetra and kept the starlight and paraos and added 6 brown pencil fish, and a few clown killiefish and a panda garra plus like 30? malayan shrimps. Also added 5 nerite snails but they all died like within 2 weeks. some kept overturning (the starlight?) had probably 10 or so shrimp causalities. They do not seem to be doing well as they tend to hide. Even when they are out, they do not seem to be actively feeding. All the fishes are doing well. Although my paros did lose some of their dark colours and are still rather pale looking but swimming around. Oh, I do inject CO2 but not at a very high level.
I recently decided to check my parameters to see why the shrimps/snail just do not live in my tank. And my tank is consistently reporting these numbers from the JBJ 7in1 test strips
Nitrate - around 20. Drops to 15 after a water change and goes to around 20-23 before. Water change around 15% every week or so. Replace only with RO water (due to distance from sink) and some equilibrium added
GH - 2-3 but I have since increased it to a consistent 4 with more equilibrium added during water change
KH - Always and have been zero as far as I recall even 3 years back
PH - This was a shock It is a consistent 4.5 Gassing off does not change this one bit. Not change during and after CO2 injection at all. I do have some surface movement with a pump but no breaking of surface just strong ripples.
Question is, should I try to raise my KH/PH to 5/6 or GH to 5-6 to have better success with shrimps and snails? The fishes seems to be happy except my paraos still has not fully coloured up since this new rescaped happened. Floaters are multiplying weekly, plants look ok. not much algae issue, other then some hair? algae on some of the leaves. Unfortunately I do not have my pre-rescape parameters as I did not test it. I believe my low KH/PH is due to the fact that I do my WC with RO only thus lowering the PH/KH over the many years.
Not sure if I should leave things as it is and not try to breed shrimps/snails or try to gradually increase my PH/KH/Gh over the next few WC. Any thoughts most welcome.
I vaccum the soil as best i could, and mistakenly vaccum all the "mulms?" behind my HMF (should have left them there), change my lights to one of the newer LED ones (running low at around 30% which should equal medium lights I guess), add as much buce and anubias on lava rocks and one drift that I would say the plants would almost cover 75% of the bottom surface if there was laid flat out. I also added floaters to cover at least 25% of the top. Water is pretty clear since it was set up 6 weeks or so ago. However. I gave away all the huge tetra and kept the starlight and paraos and added 6 brown pencil fish, and a few clown killiefish and a panda garra plus like 30? malayan shrimps. Also added 5 nerite snails but they all died like within 2 weeks. some kept overturning (the starlight?) had probably 10 or so shrimp causalities. They do not seem to be doing well as they tend to hide. Even when they are out, they do not seem to be actively feeding. All the fishes are doing well. Although my paros did lose some of their dark colours and are still rather pale looking but swimming around. Oh, I do inject CO2 but not at a very high level.
I recently decided to check my parameters to see why the shrimps/snail just do not live in my tank. And my tank is consistently reporting these numbers from the JBJ 7in1 test strips
Nitrate - around 20. Drops to 15 after a water change and goes to around 20-23 before. Water change around 15% every week or so. Replace only with RO water (due to distance from sink) and some equilibrium added
GH - 2-3 but I have since increased it to a consistent 4 with more equilibrium added during water change
KH - Always and have been zero as far as I recall even 3 years back
PH - This was a shock It is a consistent 4.5 Gassing off does not change this one bit. Not change during and after CO2 injection at all. I do have some surface movement with a pump but no breaking of surface just strong ripples.
Question is, should I try to raise my KH/PH to 5/6 or GH to 5-6 to have better success with shrimps and snails? The fishes seems to be happy except my paraos still has not fully coloured up since this new rescaped happened. Floaters are multiplying weekly, plants look ok. not much algae issue, other then some hair? algae on some of the leaves. Unfortunately I do not have my pre-rescape parameters as I did not test it. I believe my low KH/PH is due to the fact that I do my WC with RO only thus lowering the PH/KH over the many years.
Not sure if I should leave things as it is and not try to breed shrimps/snails or try to gradually increase my PH/KH/Gh over the next few WC. Any thoughts most welcome.