Water And General Tank Quality

[Kemics]

I've got a coldwater 10 gallon tank with one gold fish and 3 platys.

I have a power filter and a separate under gravel filter

once a week i feed them a few de-shelled peas to help with digestion and some blood worms. But daily feed is a pinch of flake food.

Today out of curiosity i did a water test with some home testing strips. (i usually do a water change and quick clean of the tank once a week)

i had a

PH of 7
KH of 6
GH of >16od
NO2 (mg/l) - 0
NO3 (mg/l) - Somewhere between 10 - 25 (was a very very faint beige/light pink on the test strip)

As far as i can work out everything seems fine except the Nitrate levels, is it worth doing another water change?

It seems to be impossible to find a definitive guide to looking after fish as everyone has different ideas, am i sort of on track, everything i do is just i picked up/made up as i went along.

 

[rabbut]

OK, platties aren't coldwater, they are tropical. Goldfish need a tank bigger than 10g... I personally belive it is only fare to keep goldies in ponds, as my brood stock when I used to breed them were all over 18inches.... Most on here will recomend 20g for the first goldie and another 10g for each aditional.

What I'd do here is re-home the goldfish and conert the tank to tropical so that you can keep the platties. Low temperatures will mess up a tropical fishes immune system and motabalisum if they are subjected to those lower temperatures long-term...

Test Stiripps are useless at best, and a contributing factor to fish death at worst. They regularly give false high and low readings, and are about as accurate as asking you none-fishkeeping next door neibour to guess numbers for each reading whithout any knowlage of where they should be. A good test kit would be any Liquid Regent based test kit. Many one here use and like API. Nutrafin is also regularly recomended, and I personally use the Tetra tests. I re-iterate, that these are good brands for Liquid kits, and all their strip kits are rubbish. An API kit will cost about £15 delivered on-line and will last a good year or two if stored correctly

Nitrate on any test kit is only a guide, as it is very expencive to test for accurately. A reading in the area your stripps surgest would only tell you it is low-to-medium. 25ppm is acctually lower than the tap water readings for some people near London, and nothing to worry about

HTH
Rabbut

 

[Mr Bliss]

The water is fine and the fact that you're actually testing the water is a good sign. There are differences in opinion as to how high nitrates can be allowed to get in freshwater tanks, but up to 20 - 40 ppm is pretty safe territory, and ~100 ppm is often said to be a level where fish gradually get stressed and disease-prone. Some people have more nitrates in tap water than you seem to have in your tank (although nitrate test strips are notoriously inaccurate) so it seems you're doing a decent job. Assuming the tank is cycled and the fish aren't swimming in ammonia of course...

But... how big is the goldfish? It won't be happy in a 10 gal for long. Goldfish grow big and have messy eating habits.

 

[Corleone]

As rabbut said, strips are notoriously inaccurate, but there's more to it than that. Ammonia (NH3) is the most important water stat, being more toxic than nitrite and causing permanent damage from prolonged exposure.

It's also far cheaper to get a liquid kit. A set of 5-in-1 strips plus an ammonia strip test will cost about $16 combined in my area, and will give you 25 rounds of tests. The API freshwater master kit costs $30, and will give you several hundred rounds of tests.

As for the goldfish, it's also a good idea to know if it's a fancy goldfish (the fat round guys with fancy tails) or a common, comet, or shubunkin (the kind that look like "normal" fish). The 20 for the first+10 per additional guideline has fancy goldfish in mind, which are quite a bit shorter and more compact, though they still get too big to be kept in 10 gallons long term. The normal shaped types are the 18 inch monsters, which need immense tanks (they're bigger than many monster cichlids) or ponds.

 

[Kemics]

he's probably about 10cm, the fish have been in the cold water tank for pretty much a year to the day. Except before, my flat mate at uni was 'looking after' them and they were 3 gallon tank with algae so thick it was turning the tank black in places. Basically i've liberated them

All of them seem fine and healthy, except the male platy gives me a little concern because while the other two (females) look in excellent condition very smooth a shiny, the male looks a little crinkly (if thats a word)

One of my females has developed a dark black spot just above her anal fin, at first i thought this might mean she is pregnant, but it seems that it should look rather like a darker patch, whereas she has a very clear, defined and dark spot.

 

[millie1]

just to add.... ive got 3 goldfish that are happy in their small tank (and a weather loach)- but i know its too small and they will eventually become unhappy,,, so ive chose to re-home them..... which is the ebst for them - even though im quite attatched!!!