Am I Overstocked...?

[electric yellow]

My partner sounds like your parents...

He gets in the way...thinks the tanks (i have 3) miraculouslly clean and maintain themselves.

As for maintenance...i forgot to do my weekly water change a few weeks in a row and lost 3/4s of one of my tanks stock to an internal bacteria.



Some of them I had since they were fry

Learned that lesson well. Now i change every week and test every three days for levels. Never have probs with ammonia oor the other levels apart from pH.

*touches wood*

The strongest have survived. While the tank looks empty i am n ot going to restock as the surviving fishies seem happy.

Regular maintenance =

 

[Aleydis]

electric yellow- Congratulations on your overall success with fishkeeping, and am sorry for your loss. I wish I knew how to preperly maintenance earlier. Then maybe this situation could have been avoided.
Right now I've only begun to experience some loss. I hope this doesn't result in my community tank being turned into a graveyard.

My days probably won't be very good if I end up seeing sick/dead fish showing up every morning.

 

[Corleone]

From experience from several sides of similar disputes (not necessarily fish related): If your mom's on your side, dad will come around inside of a week, weather he likes it or not

Edit: Didn't realize your parents didn't speak English. It says your from Canada, do they speak French? You could try google.fr and try to find some French fishkeeping forums. The information shouldn't be too different.

 

[Aleydis]

Canada is a multilingual country. Of course, its main languages are English and French, but Canada is also heavily populated by immigrants. We've integrated, and thus we are Canadian citizens, but my parents do speak a different language, though I no longer have any problems.
They say when they go back to their country (We go there once every year for vacation) they'll pick up some fishkeeping books. My dad CONTINUES to be cocky about it, saying "Just you wait until the books prove you wrong!"
I could just laugh if I wasn't so stressed right now. I NEED STRESS RELIEVERS TOO D<

Also, I'm starting up a fishkeeping diary. I'll post the link here after I've finished setting it up. The diary will include more info, probably.

 

[ALEXF]

im glad it seems youve gotten the help youve needed. I also want to thank you for changing your color from that purple. I started to read it before but the color literally gave me a headache. I hope things turn around for you.

 

[Aleydis]

Yay! Here's the link to my tank diary: http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?showto...=0#entry2037353

(Beware! It's a looonnnng read!)

ALEXF- You're welcome. I hadn't realized that it was such a big deal before somebody brought it up. I'll change my siggy sometime soon as well.

 

[Corleone]

Canada is a multilingual country. Of course, its main languages are English and French, but Canada is also heavily populated by immigrants.

I know there's other languages spoken in Canada, just thought it would be worth a shot. Most of the common languages should have at least some information available, though there's not all that much anything on the internet that isn't in a major European language, Chinese, or Japanese, and unless Google has the language in their settings, good luck finding what there is out there.

Really hope your dad comes around, just the same, and hope you get the tank squared away - these sort of starter problems are all too common, and it's why a lot of people stop keeping fish.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

Hey Aleydis, sorry your having problems but glad you've a test kit now and your Mum's on side at least.

if you have a read of the link in my sig 'whats cycling' it explains what you need to do, basically for the next couple of weeks you should be doing water changes every day to keep ammonia and nitrite as low as possible. Now this isn't forever, it's just a couple of weeks until the tank is cycled and your through the worst of it, I promise you it gets easier after this. Now you see why we say fishless cycling is best because you don't have to go through the daily water changes and all that stuff. You can compromise on the testing, honestly for the next week or two you can guarantee your tests will show ammonia and nitrite, if you just do big water changes but don't test you won't know exactly how well you're controlling them but you will be making things better, so hopefully that's a bit of a compromise for your family. Just test once or twice a week for the next few weeks, when you start to see that ammonia and nitrite are down pretty low you may need to do a few days of daily tests to make sure it's OK. But then once the few weeks of cycling is done you can test once a week for a few months, then after that just once a month, then after maybe 6 months you just test if you see a problem.

So I know it all feel's like a whole lot of work, but it's not forever so just try and grit your teeth and get through it.

Incase you don't know there are a lot of translation websites out there where you can just copy and paste text in one language and it translates it into another, it'll probably be a bit of a bad translation with some grammar wrong etc but it should at least make sense to your parents.