Restarting My Tank.pls Help

[qwertylol52]

i have a 15 gall tank with 4 platys, 1 cory and 1 rhino plec...on the bottom i have bout 8 live plants and a layer of soil pellets for the plants..whenever i stir the water, the soil pellets would move about and thre would be lots of soil powder floating about in my tank, making it very cloudy and dirty..i only bought it as the store owner said that the plants would grow in the soil, but not gravel..but the soil pellets always make my water dirty and cloudy, so i cant clean up the fish poo stuck between...im thinking of restarting my tank as it has lots of diseases recently...so my questions are :

1) how do i restart my tank? ( of cops i need to recycle it)

2) if i were to restart my tank, can i use gravel instead of soil pellets...would the plants still grow?

 

[Mr. Convict]

I don't understand what you mean when you say restart your tank.

Do you mean like remove everything (including the fish) and just start over entirely, or do you mean just change the substrate (gravel/soil etc)

2- Yes, plants can grow in gravel, you should look into laterite, flourite and other substrate which are good for live plants (i wouldn't know as none of that stuff is available to me where i live , a post in the planted aquariums section would get you alot of answers)

EDIT - lol, saw that you did post in the planted tank section

PS. if you intend to keep the fish, please note that the rhino plec will get too big for your aquarium (they can grow up to 14"), so you will have to move it eventually

 

[LauraFrog]

I grow a lot of plants in gravel aquariums with overhead and in some cases undergravel filtration. None of them give me any trouble. If you find that your plants won't grow in the gravel there's an easy solution. Get some real driftwood or rocks and some fishing line. Buy some young Anubias plants and spread the roots around the wood or rock. Then tie them in place with fishing line. The roots will grow on the ornament and fix the plant there tightly. They will grow and grow and look very nice given time. You can buy varieties with red stems, and species come with different size and shape of leaves as well, such as tiny leaves the size of coins to huge leaves that might be the size of an adult's palm, and long leaves.

 

[waterdrop]

Hi qwerty, I think you've got the right idea, coming here to the "New to the Hobby" section and getting yourself restarted and posting up the odd plant thing in the planted tanks section. If you persist, you should be able to get it worked out.

What you are doing with all the plant pellets sounds very strange and I would stick with the questions and see if you can figure out whether it is wrong or right over in the planed section. Some of them are quite nice about answering questions for us newbies over there.

You sound like "easy plants" (annubias, java ferns and some others) might be a good way to go, so you will need to learn about "low-light" (1.x watts/gallon) technique and appropriate fertilization and possibly liquid carbon additions (at the most, and it fact there are probably even simpler combinations of actions that could be learned.) The four skill sets of plants are light, fertilization, carbon-dioxide and algae. Each has some things that need to be learned.

Back to the main question: the tank of fish. Since you've had diseases and some incorrect stocking and mention "newbie woes" in the title, it would probably be good to consider yourself a beginner and continue to seek help in this thread you've started. Right away you'll benefit this weekend if you begin reading the "pinned" threads at the top of this forum. There are a number of topics about the nitrogen cycle and about water changes and stocking that you need to begin to absorb.

Your first issues may turn out to be test kits, nitrogen cycle (which includes understanding your filter) and water change techniques. Good luck,

~~waterdrop~~