Hello all,
I'm an admitted newbie to this forum, a graduate student in DC who, along with my husband, has spent the last several months to a year trying to get our first freshwater aquarium started. We have with a 26-gal aquarium, with a power wheel filter (Marineland Emperor 280 BioWheel, with charcoal/zeolite in its cartridge as directed), a heater, a thermometer (it's generally between 75 and 79 degrees with our heater on its lowest setting), fake plants only. We have hard (perhaps very hard) tap water. We use a water conditioner, of course, and use it to neutralize both chlorines and chloramines. We haven't tried (as far as we know) unusual or difficult-to-care-for fish, nor have we stocked heavily, yet we seem to have had nothing but trouble with our tank.
We started with maybe five Glofish (zebra danios), some of which did ok for some time, although two died out after a few weeks. After a few weeks of the Glofish we added maybe 3 Glofish and a 3 cory catfish. Within a few weeks, a few Glofish and cories had died (one disappeared entirely....???). We had been testing regularly, and weren't sure whether we had cycled (we didn't notice the types of fluxuations in our test strips that our books/info said indicated cycling), but nor did we ever get dangerous levels. We test for ammonia, hardness, pH, alkalinity, nitrates, nitrites, and none have ever appeared to be concerningly within the danger zone. We also do partial water changes regularly, or whenever our ammonia or some other level is climbing, sometimes (when we've had some deaths, etc) as much as 80% or more of the water. We know there is a lot of disagreement about whether larger or smaller water changes are best, but our particular book recommends large ones, so we err on that side. In any case, for a few months we seemed to have regular die-offs (one or two at a time) in our fish, experimenting primarily with Glofish, occasionally with cory catfish, and - briefly - with bamboo shrimp. We've never had more than 8-10 fish in the tank at a time yet, because we haven't been successful enough to feel comfortable stocking up higher. Finally, after we had gotten some brown algae out-breaks and added algae-reducers (which we presume is not related, but it's worth mentioning everything!), all of the fish that were left died (some of the Glofish had lived for many months, though as you can see we had had trouble keeping a constant, if light, stock for very long).
So that was take one, lasting maybe six months, before we just cleaned out the tank, cleaned off the plants/statues/rocks, changed the filter and charcoal (but kept the wheel, in case it might help establish a biofilter sooner), put in new gravel, and added and conditioned our tap water. We let that water sit for a week or two with no fish (plus a small amount of fish flakes to decompose per advice we stumbled on some of our research), then did a big water change (just to be sure that any possible residue from dish soap, like Palmolive, which was used on the statues to help get off the algae. was washed away), and tried, in our "new" tank, four black mollies just two days ago. They seemed active at the store, but within a day at least one was dead and at least two were looking very bad. Today we ran all the tests (both strip and tube/chemical ammonia tests as well as strip tests for other water aspects) and none of our results showed levels out of safe bounds. Water temperature has been 78 or so. We know mollies like salinity, but nothing we've read has said they require it, and since our water is on the hard side, we haven't added any aquarium salt. We did a major water change today, just to try to freshen the tank just in case it might help, and now we are watching our two sickly mollies, hoping they might make a recovery, but we just don't know what to expect, or what to do if these die, including whether to even try again. We both have done a lot of research, yet we seem to be having awful luck.
Again, we've never really been sure whether we've gotten the tank to successfully cycle at any point. We stocked slowly, kept levels safe, did regular water changes, and had our first tank for many months before the cleaning out and trying again I mentioned (which just happened two weeks ago or so). Though we test semi-regularly, we've never noticed much of a change in our nitrates or nitrites, even as our ammonia levels have fluctuated....??? :1zhelp:
I apologize if this is a scattered post, or if I've left anything out that is relevant. We really want to be successful and to keep at it, but we feel awful about the fish that have already died and aren't sure whether we should even keep going at this point! Are there any glaring problems in our approach so far? Anything else in the water we're failing to test for? We don't know what we're doing wrong.
(I know this isn't best, but our options are limited, so our fish and equipment have all come from PetCo.)
Thank you SO much in advance, and thanks to all for having such an informative forum!
I'm an admitted newbie to this forum, a graduate student in DC who, along with my husband, has spent the last several months to a year trying to get our first freshwater aquarium started. We have with a 26-gal aquarium, with a power wheel filter (Marineland Emperor 280 BioWheel, with charcoal/zeolite in its cartridge as directed), a heater, a thermometer (it's generally between 75 and 79 degrees with our heater on its lowest setting), fake plants only. We have hard (perhaps very hard) tap water. We use a water conditioner, of course, and use it to neutralize both chlorines and chloramines. We haven't tried (as far as we know) unusual or difficult-to-care-for fish, nor have we stocked heavily, yet we seem to have had nothing but trouble with our tank.
We started with maybe five Glofish (zebra danios), some of which did ok for some time, although two died out after a few weeks. After a few weeks of the Glofish we added maybe 3 Glofish and a 3 cory catfish. Within a few weeks, a few Glofish and cories had died (one disappeared entirely....???). We had been testing regularly, and weren't sure whether we had cycled (we didn't notice the types of fluxuations in our test strips that our books/info said indicated cycling), but nor did we ever get dangerous levels. We test for ammonia, hardness, pH, alkalinity, nitrates, nitrites, and none have ever appeared to be concerningly within the danger zone. We also do partial water changes regularly, or whenever our ammonia or some other level is climbing, sometimes (when we've had some deaths, etc) as much as 80% or more of the water. We know there is a lot of disagreement about whether larger or smaller water changes are best, but our particular book recommends large ones, so we err on that side. In any case, for a few months we seemed to have regular die-offs (one or two at a time) in our fish, experimenting primarily with Glofish, occasionally with cory catfish, and - briefly - with bamboo shrimp. We've never had more than 8-10 fish in the tank at a time yet, because we haven't been successful enough to feel comfortable stocking up higher. Finally, after we had gotten some brown algae out-breaks and added algae-reducers (which we presume is not related, but it's worth mentioning everything!), all of the fish that were left died (some of the Glofish had lived for many months, though as you can see we had had trouble keeping a constant, if light, stock for very long).
So that was take one, lasting maybe six months, before we just cleaned out the tank, cleaned off the plants/statues/rocks, changed the filter and charcoal (but kept the wheel, in case it might help establish a biofilter sooner), put in new gravel, and added and conditioned our tap water. We let that water sit for a week or two with no fish (plus a small amount of fish flakes to decompose per advice we stumbled on some of our research), then did a big water change (just to be sure that any possible residue from dish soap, like Palmolive, which was used on the statues to help get off the algae. was washed away), and tried, in our "new" tank, four black mollies just two days ago. They seemed active at the store, but within a day at least one was dead and at least two were looking very bad. Today we ran all the tests (both strip and tube/chemical ammonia tests as well as strip tests for other water aspects) and none of our results showed levels out of safe bounds. Water temperature has been 78 or so. We know mollies like salinity, but nothing we've read has said they require it, and since our water is on the hard side, we haven't added any aquarium salt. We did a major water change today, just to try to freshen the tank just in case it might help, and now we are watching our two sickly mollies, hoping they might make a recovery, but we just don't know what to expect, or what to do if these die, including whether to even try again. We both have done a lot of research, yet we seem to be having awful luck.
Again, we've never really been sure whether we've gotten the tank to successfully cycle at any point. We stocked slowly, kept levels safe, did regular water changes, and had our first tank for many months before the cleaning out and trying again I mentioned (which just happened two weeks ago or so). Though we test semi-regularly, we've never noticed much of a change in our nitrates or nitrites, even as our ammonia levels have fluctuated....??? :1zhelp:
I apologize if this is a scattered post, or if I've left anything out that is relevant. We really want to be successful and to keep at it, but we feel awful about the fish that have already died and aren't sure whether we should even keep going at this point! Are there any glaring problems in our approach so far? Anything else in the water we're failing to test for? We don't know what we're doing wrong.
(I know this isn't best, but our options are limited, so our fish and equipment have all come from PetCo.)
Thank you SO much in advance, and thanks to all for having such an informative forum!
It beats paying $45 for it at a LFS.