Recent content by Dandy

Oh right, I thought female bettas were fine for community aquariums. Also thought kissing gouramis stayed small. Definitely need to do research before buying any fish. We didn't for the livebearers as we figured that's what everyone starts out with and the pet shops say they're easy to keep. I...

We've just bought a new Fluval gravel cleaner for about £16. Wish I'd thought of the DIY money saving solution! Normally we use that (or the old cheap one we had) to siphon water into a bucket and carry that bucket away. Refilling buckets next to the tank is a good idea though. Normally we don't...

We've decided that we're going to put the tetras back into the big tank and build around those, and let the livebearers live out the rest of their days in the smaller tank and not buy any more for that tank so eventually (if they stop breeding!) we'll have none left. We'll try improve the...

Yeah I've been doing further research on Google on the water hardness thing and lots of people are saying not to keep tetras and livebearers together. We will have to phase out the livebearers and go with a different kind of tank, which is a shame because we like livebearers more than tetras due...

Thanks essjay. I will buy some eSHa gdex and treat the tank with it. I wish pet shops gave you more information on stocking fish. I mean I bought mollies on the same day as black phantom tetras when we started the tank and no one in the store said mixing livebearers with tetras is bad. I think...

Thanks for taking a look at them. I didn't know livebearers hate soft water, we got them thinking they'd be easy to look after. We did have very little problems with loosing fish until about 4 months into the tank though, apart from losing a couple of pregnant guppies. Apparently it's common...

Thanks for the replies For water testing I use the Tetra 6 in 1 strips and a separate ammonia test kit. They don't give exact numbers as they're colour based, but give some idea of the water quality. Everything on the strip is within the green (ok) ranges apart from PH (off the scale belw 6.4)...

Apologies for the long read, it is detailed. We started fish keeping in December 2018, and around February 2019 we made a terrible decision to purchase some Ramshorn snails off eBay to help with cleaning algae off the tank as we'd read snails are good at that. It worked, but we didn't realise...