New Here

[Rhindon]

Hi, I'm new to the forum.

I inherited my mother's 37 gallon tank with an 8 inch Plecostomus (sp?), as she was only still keeping the tank because she feels this is my daughter's fish. I moved some things I had in a smaller tank and am glad I did. The nitrite was too high and the fish I had needed a bigger tank.

My old tank had a Top Fin filter. This is running a Fluval 204.

Current setup:

1 8 inch Plecostomus
8 Glofish
2 Black Skirt Tetras
2 Neon Tetras
1 Gold Mystery Snail

The tank was FULL of algae. A little coating on the walls, but mostly all over the ornaments and gravel. Because of the Glofish I wanted black gravel anyway so I didn't use any of the gravel my mom had. I rinsed some of the media in the filter, but not all, and scraped all the algae off the walls of the tank with the exception of the back wall so that Cinderella (that's what my daughter named the Pleco years ago when he/she was still small) would have something to eat. I am also dropping algae wafers in. I thoroughly cleaned the ornamentation that I wanted to use from that tank. There was a HUGE castle, but Cinderella likes to spend most of her time in it, so I kept it.

Current readings (API liquid master test kit):

pH: 7.4
Ammonia: 0.50
Nitrie: 0.00
Nitrate: 10

Any suggestions? The fish seem to be doing alright, but the water's a bit cloudy. Anything else you'd recommend I add to the mix once the ammonia is down? Will the nitrate come up on it's own or is it ok at this level? I am feeding flake food and dropping algae wafers in, but I'm worried Cinderella won't have enough to eat.

Thank you for any advice you have to offer!

 

[cowboy507]

hello and welcome to the fourm!

Did you rinse the filter in tap water? or old tank water?
if you rinsed it in tap water then you might have killed some of the good bacs that keep the ammonia and nitrItes at 0. you might have a mini cycle that you will have to go through before you can add more fish. Check out my cycling links on my signature. the nitrate will probably go up.

your 8 goldfish are going to get to big for your tank, they really need much bigger setups, a pond is recommended to keep goldfish, but if you rehome those than you could probably add a few things.

 

[Rhindon]

hello and welcome to the fourm!

Did you rinse the filter in tap water? or old tank water?
if you rinsed it in tap water then you might have killed some of the good bacs that keep the ammonia and nitrItes at 0. you might have a mini cycle that you will have to go through before you can add more fish. Check out my cycling links on my signature. the nitrate will probably go up.

your 8 goldfish are going to get to big for your tank, they really need much bigger setups, a pond is recommended to keep goldfish, but if you rehome those than you could probably add a few things.

Thank you Cowboy!

I did rinse it in tap water because we had taken down the tank and cleaned it at my mom's to transport it over here. I didn't think about cleaning out any of the filter until I got it here. It was NASTY but I didn't completely clean it out.

They are GLOfish, not goldfish. Supposedly they will only get to be 1.5 inches max. Do you think this will still be a problem?

 

[cowboy507]

Oh okay, must of read that wrong, glofish are alright! sorry about that.

I would wait through the mini cycle that you will go through. Waiting untill the nitrites and ammonia gets down to 0 for a few weeks till adding more fish.

Now some additions you could do, although you are very close to your stocking limit, are some more neons, groups of 6+ look great. you might be able to add an angle, only if your tank is at least 18in tall.

 

[Rhindon]

No problem. I was planning to wait until ammonia and nitrites were down to zero before adding anything. That filter seems pretty good. I've never had a canister filter before.

I would love to have an angel fish but aren't they best in pairs? The tank is 22 3/4 inches tall.

Are neons pretty hearty? I have a few friends that didn't have much luck with them. A lot of it will depend on what my daughter (she's almost 9) wants. She seems to like the black skirts though. And she loves those Glofish, but I'm not sure I want to get anymore of those.

 

[cowboy507]

neons are the hardiest, but if proper care is done then they can be fine. angles can be kept alone, i believe.
black skirts are nice, they look good in large groups too.

 

[waterdrop]

Seems like the two things to worry about here would be old tank syndrome and the potential mini-cycle from the tap water cleaning. If the mom's tank had a lot of algae and a dirty substrate then that could indicate a lack of weekend water changes, which could mean the fish she had could have grown used to very high trace metals and minerals among other things. The concern is that a sudden large water change could change this conditions more quickly than some species can stand. It sounds as if a total water change may have already happened though, with the gravel change and if the fish have survived it then perhaps OTS is not a concern here.

The mini-cycle concern is a more common thing and may not turn out to be too much of a problem. It sounds like the filter was quite mature and not overly cleaned, which bodes well for the bacterial colonies surviving. You already have an API kit, so you have the tool you need. Start an aquarium notebook if you don't have one already and for now you should be testing at least ammonia and nitrite(NO2) every 12 hours. Read the Fish-In Cycling article carefully as that's the situation you should consider yourself to be in until you can prove otherwise. In addition, be sure to understand that good maintenance habits should now begin and larger gravel-clean-water-changes with good technique will be better than smaller ones, assuming your tap stats are good (post those up too.)

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Rhindon]

Thanks! I didn't think to do stats on the straight tap water. That's probably a good idea.

The only fish in there now that was in the tank at my mom's was the big plecostomus. So far she seems fine, but yes, it was a complete water change and new substrate as we moved the tank from her house to my apartment. She said she had never cleaned the filter so in a way that's good I guess. I rinsed parts of the media because it is several years old and the foam portion (Fluval 204) looked nearly clogged with brown goo. Since the old tank water was already gone, I did rinse it with tap.

I have been checking the water two times a day. I will continue to do so until the ammonia comes down to zero, my guess is I will have a little nitrite spike when that happens and then the nitrate boost if what I've read around here proves true for this cycle as well.

My other question is this: with the syphon system I now have, how do I treat the water when I do gravel cleans/water changes? The water will come through the tube straight into the tank from my sink. Should I pretreat the tank water with conditioner, then do the water change or add the conditioner immediately after the water change? Anything else I should consider?

 

[waterdrop]

You'll just need to be sure to dose the conditioner for tank volume rather than the volume of new water being added. I and many others do this all the time. What I do is split my conditioner dosing in half. I dump the first half (I use the very concentrated Prime, so its just a bit of a capful) directly into the spraybar stream in the tank and then as I near the end of the hose refill (or right afterward) I toss the second half of the dose into the spraybar stream. I also roughly temperature match my tank refills, but your tank is bigger than my son's and as tanks get bigger, if the water change is not overly large, the incoming water can be cooler and cooler and usually it won't matter, in fact the fish will probably delight in it. But for now, until you've got some good months of stability and know the fish are well adjusted and the biofitler stable, it wouldn't be a bad idea to continue to temperature match in my opinion.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[chesterscot]

to tff your in safe hands with waterdrop
scot

 

[Rhindon]

I don't think I've seen Prime here but I will look for it. Thanks for all the advice. I will have to check numbers before and after. The Pleco is nice, but she's at least 7 years old. Once she passes (hopefully from old age), I will have a little more room for stocking.

 

[waterdrop]

Interesting, the seachem website does say their products are available in uk and many other euro places but I can't remember how readily our uk members seem to find these products. I know when I was checking for availability of easylife easycarbo I found out that stuff was not making it over to the states. There also the Tetratec filters that get a lot of UK discussion but are not distributed in the states, so there are a number of things that have one-sided distribution.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Rhindon]

It looks like Petco may carry it. I usually get my kittens' food there so I will check when I go there later this week. Thanks!

 

[Rhindon]

Tap water results:

pH 7.4
Ammonia 0.50
Nitrite 0.00
Nitrate 5

Tank results when I got home were
pH 7.4
Ammonia 0.50
Nitrite 1.00
Nitrate 20

I performed a 50% water change a little bit ago and will check the readings again tomorrow.

 

[waterdrop]

I was wrong about your mini-cycle maybe not being a problem, its looking a bit more serious with 1.0ppm nitrite(NO2) showing up that quickly.

Its good that you did a water change but now they need to get bigger. I'd make the next one a 70% change and if you have time it would actually be great to do two with an hour between them. Since you already did the complete water change in the beginning there's nothing to be done anymore about possible old tank syndrome, so we'll hope they're not affected by that and since they're still alive that's a good sign. Now the big goal is the tough business of trying to hold nitrite(NO2) below 0.25ppm, to minimize permanent nerve damage. The ammonia will of course be nearly impossible to get below the tap water reading for the time being. (do you have lots of rain where you are? if you wait for the middle of a downpour after the dirt's been washed off the roof you can take roof runoff and test it...)

~~waterdrop~~