Recent content by Aynia

Hey all! Update here. The plecos seem almost back to normal. I've been doing about 50% water changes every 2-3 days and replacing the salt and adding stress guard. Now when I feed the plecos come right out and start eating, but my loaches still don't seem to have much interest in food at all...

Right, we used silicone II which has mold free additives. when I went to the store I went to the silicone 1 bin but they must have had it stocked with silicone 2 and I didn't notice. I feel so horrible and I cried when they passed. It seriously happened so fast. We used it to seal our sump, to...

Yeah, the tank the loaches and plecos are in now is a clean quarantine tank, so they're safe and being treated with aquarium salt and stress guard. We aren't sure if there's anything else we can do for them, or if the stress guard and aquarium salt is all we're able to give them at the moment?

So, I'm very overwhelmed and there's quite a bit to unpack here. I hope it's ok that I just made about a 10 minute video to explain the situation. You can find it here: Basically, we used to wrong silicone, lost about 70 fish, and we have 2 yoyo loaches and 2 bristlenose plecos fighting hard...

So we noticed the day before last that 75% of one of our male guppy's tail is just... gone. It looks maybe like it got caught on something and ripped? I would think there's no way it was our other fish (4 female guppies, 2 males, ~25 fry, 3 yoyo's and 3 bn plecos), because their mouths are too...

You are doing a great job! It is very apparent how much you love your fish and I really admire that :D It doesn't sound like she's ready to give up the fight yet, just judge what you think her quality of life is and when she tells you she's ready, then she's ready. If I thought cats were bad at...

Black Friday coming up :D Plus maybe see if there's a local fish group near you? You could trade or buy off them for probably much cheaper than buying new in the store. You could also look at local groups for sourcing your fish, which could save some money. Setting up our 38 gal bowfront from...

They actually make premade filter sponges, they have a hole cut almost all the way through and it just slips over the intake. Usually only a couple bucks so they don't break the bank. We have one on both our intakes because we have young fry, and they work great. They will attract a lot of gunk...

We've had it in about 20 hours, and I checked the water on my lunch break today. Ph has raised from 6 to 6.5, KH raised from 0 to 40. We're going to keep an eye on it and if the ph starts to get too high we'll take it out. Good thing we put it in a media bag and didn't just add it to the...

After some more research I've concluded that the KH being at zero means there's no ph buffer and it's causing our ph to crash. Went and picked up some crushed coral and put it in a mesh bag and tucked it into the corner next to the intake filter. I'm hoping that if we get our KH up we can get...

So we took a water sample to the local fish store and they tested and said it was 150. We ordered a kit on amazon that includes gh/kh and it read that our GH was 180+ and our KH was 0. Our PH issue is still happening, it's gradually fallen down to 6.0-6.2 range. We just don't know when it will...

I'm going to talk to my husband and take a water sample to our LFS probably tomorrow afternoon, so I can get some hard numbers and finally see what we're dealing with

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07MZ47MGC/?tag= This is the water tester that I got off Amazon. When I test the water from the tap it flashes red and says 314ppm.

So we got the GH tester yesterday, and it's reading a GH of 314ppm. Unless I'm wrong, that translates into a GH of 17.5 degrees!! Could this have been part of why we lost the three loaches? There's just so much going on with this tank at the moment it's hard to keep track of what could be...

Is there any way to know how low it may go? Or if and when it'll even out? Our tap water is ph 7.7, so water changes raise it a bit. I'm thinking that you are right though, that the soft water is contributing to the alkalinity causing the ph to drop. We're mainly just worried how low it will go...