I added the next batch of fish on Saturday – 6 Cardinal Tetras (Paracheirodon axelrodi). I’ll be adding at least another 6 and possibly a further 6 after that to build up a nice shoal.
Here’s a pic of them from this afternoon:
They’re still quite small in relation to the Blank Phantoms so if they [...]
Now that the fish have been in for a couple of days it looks as if I may actually have a 50:50 split of male to female. The other two are possibly younger and have not yet developed full colouring, but they do appear to have red on the pelvic and adipose fins and the [...]
Its been a busy day today. I have declared the cycle complete so I performed the big water change this morning – somewhere in the region of 80-90%. I also gave the hygrophila difformis a good trim and removed one of the large swords & replaced it with a couple of its child plants.
To start [...]
After nigh on three weeks of nitrite dropping by a consistent amount each day, I decided to post on the Practical Fishkeeping forum regarding it not speeding up. The reply on there would suggest that the cycle may well be complete, but I’ve been overdoing the ammonia. I tested at 20:00 this evening and it [...]
The plants in the tank needed a good trim so I went to town yesterday and went from this (unfortunately I got a bad reflection in the pic):
To this:
I’ve removed the vallis from the back right of the tank as it just didn’t look right, and moved the sword that was in the [...]
Cycle is almost there now. Nitrite is almost down to 0. Onto the pics:
This is what the tank looked like just over a week ago. It seems to get rather cloudy and went worse than this before the KH drop induced water change.
Luckily the water change & fixing the KH/pH seems to have [...]
The cycle seems to be back on track now. Ammonia is processing 10ml to 0 and nitrite was down to 0.3 last night. Hoping for 0 tonight. KH is stable for the time being after adding the bicarb at the weekend.
After being stable since the water change, the KH has dropped again by 1 dKH and the pH has fallen back to 6.6-6.8. I’ve added 4 tspn of Bicarb to the tank tonight to prop it up, but I’m still looking for the reason.
Annoyingly after my earlier optimism, the nitrite doesn’t seem to be dropping [...]
