Hi All,
My name is Mike from Florida. I’m 44 years old. Back when I was in my late teens early 20’s I was big time into Reef tanks. Started a small business building wet dry filters, protein skimmers, custom tanks and just about everything else I could make from acrylic. I had a magnificent 150 g system that was lost to a power outage after moving the tank into a new house. To make a long story short I was devastated and gave it up. I recently decided to get a tank for my new house and went with South American Cichlids. Only because I wanted easy. I know little about optimum conditions for these fish but this is what I have. The tank is 55 g I have 2 Marineland 150 bio filters (one on each end) that I cycled with ammonium chloride prior to tank set up. The water temp is 78F. The tank is about 6 months old now. Ammonia / Nitrite is zero with Nitrate holding at about 15ppm. I have been doing 5 to 8 gallon water changes every 7 or so days My ph is 7.9 to 8.0. Everything in the tank is fake, not sure about live plants. There are 5 South Americans in there right now. 3 of them about 3" long the other 2 about 4 to 5" long. The fish seem to be doing fine. I did have a bad outbreak of Ich about a month ago and though I was going to loss the fish. They where up side down and just covered with it. I used Kordon Ich Attack. Took about 30 days but no body died.
Any suggestions / advise for a new bee would be much approached.
TIA,
Mike
PS. I’m not sure what type of South Americans I have I think this is a Red Devil

My name is Mike from Florida. I’m 44 years old. Back when I was in my late teens early 20’s I was big time into Reef tanks. Started a small business building wet dry filters, protein skimmers, custom tanks and just about everything else I could make from acrylic. I had a magnificent 150 g system that was lost to a power outage after moving the tank into a new house. To make a long story short I was devastated and gave it up. I recently decided to get a tank for my new house and went with South American Cichlids. Only because I wanted easy. I know little about optimum conditions for these fish but this is what I have. The tank is 55 g I have 2 Marineland 150 bio filters (one on each end) that I cycled with ammonium chloride prior to tank set up. The water temp is 78F. The tank is about 6 months old now. Ammonia / Nitrite is zero with Nitrate holding at about 15ppm. I have been doing 5 to 8 gallon water changes every 7 or so days My ph is 7.9 to 8.0. Everything in the tank is fake, not sure about live plants. There are 5 South Americans in there right now. 3 of them about 3" long the other 2 about 4 to 5" long. The fish seem to be doing fine. I did have a bad outbreak of Ich about a month ago and though I was going to loss the fish. They where up side down and just covered with it. I used Kordon Ich Attack. Took about 30 days but no body died.
Any suggestions / advise for a new bee would be much approached.
TIA,
Mike
PS. I’m not sure what type of South Americans I have I think this is a Red Devil

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