Reactor Fine-Tuning

No matter what kind of bubble rate I fed to my new reactor, I could not turn the drop checker color too far off of blue, and certainly not any type of yellow tint. In fact, at the end of the day, if I turned the Rio pump off, a large mass of CO2 would move up the tube, and sometimes out of the pump. There was no way in my old reactor, that that much CO2 could fail to dissolve. Something was up.

I tried posting on the APC forum, but I did not get a whole lot of help. However, this picture from another DIY thread indicates a judicious number of bio balls -- five. Considering I was using twenty, I was led to believe this might be problematic. My hypothesis is that having so many balls creates too much structure, allowing pockets of gas to form and hide from turbulent flow. Perhaps if there was a stronger pump whose flowrate overwhelmed the reactor, it would be a different story, but I believe as it stands, the Rio 600 is finding the path of least resistance around the bio balls, leaving the gas pockets alone.

Fortunately, I had enough foresight to make it relatively easy to take the reactor apart, so it was just a matter of using enough elbow grease to unscrew the bottom. I ended up dumping out 14, leaving six in, just to block the exit. I expect most of the dissolution to occur upstream of the balls now.

I now anxiously await the drop checker turning green, but not yellow. That was my one hesitation: that I was taking away the fuctionality of the fish-friendly diffusor I had inadvertantly created. It seems apparent to me that it would not diffuse CO2 quickly enough to kill fish; there was plenty of CO2 left undiffused at the end of the day, while the drop cheker was still showing blue. I was seeing signs of CO2 deficiency though (black BBA edges around some temple and amazon sword leaves), so for right now, I will moniter conditions closely, but try to boost CO2 concentration. Actually, there's probably a happy medium of number of bio balls to be found at which it will only diffuse max 30 ppm, but it would be very difficult to establish that such a configuration existed.

As an aside, I was pleased to see a few golden kuhliis squirming about the rotala indica while I was doing all this. I actually spotted at least four at the same time, so that was a reassuring sight.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Last night I did my 50% water change, but I got distracted, and it ended up being more like a 75% water change (the picture was taken after I had added quite a bit of water). It actually got low enough that the filter pump went dry and stopped circulating. I was a little worried about shocking the fish, so I actually added a trickle out of the hot spigot to try to mitigate any temperature change.

After the refill and the room lights were turned off, I began to sprinkle food pellets in hopes that the golden kuhliis had something to eat, and as luck would have it, I was able to see two of them swimming around just like they did when I first got them (hopefully not out of distress). I can only hope that there were four more alive and well, reluctant to come out of their nest for whatever reason.

It hasn't ever been exactly quiet since I hooked it up to my CO2 reactor, but I'm noticing how noisy the pump is lately. I also spotted quite a bit of green spot and other brown algae in the tubing closest to the lights, so I will consider replacing it with opaque tubing in the future.

Speaking of the CO2 reactor, I also bought some suction clamps from PetsMart today to replace the tropical fish veggie clip I had been improvising with. Much cleaner look, even if the C-clamps are not tight on the tubing.

Five-Gallon Redo

For your viewing pleasure, a picture diary of my 5-gallon redo:

Old gravel


Good as new


Together, my substrate cost less than $10 from Home Depot


First the dirt goes down


Then some sifted gravel with a plastic pot for a sieve


An idea of the layer thicknesses


Two rocks back-to-back for a centerpiece


Filled with water and a few plants

A Kuhlii Spotting

This morning, I was just thinking to myself, "man it would be nice to see my golden kuhliis, and assuage my fears of their early demise". No sooner did I start contemplating what I would give to see one healthy and swimming around, I saw the tail of one wiggle and disappear over the middle piece of driftwood! Now, as soon as I see five more, I'll feel really good.

Cleaning House

Tank update after glass cleaning:


Since my blue/black algae eating shrimp have gradually turned pink over that last few weeks, I thought it worth investigating what they actually were (and if that was a healthy color change). With the help of this website, I have come to the conclusion that they are cherry shrimp that were too stressed or young or something to show their color. They seem to still be doing their job, though, and while they are not the spectacular red that I have seen in some pictures, they are very attractive for invertabrates, nonetheless.

With all the planted tank forum threads I've been surfing, I've frequently come across an acronym I was unfamiliar with - HC. People used it in reference to some kind of ground cover plant, quite favorably I might add. I inadvertently discovered during an unrelated search that HC in fact stands for "hemianthus callitrichoides". Good to know

What do Brad Lidge and my aquarium have in common?

No more "Lights Out"!












It has been four days, which should be sufficient to kill of the BGA, so I got to put the light fixture back with the legs fixed so that it nicely stradled the top. I want to let it continue without any photosynthesis through the night, but I still went ahead and changed the water (though not quite 50% of it).

Some notes from the water change:

• I tried moving the foam pad to the inside of the Rio pump, but it provided too much resistence, and the pump wasn't able to move the water.
• I cleaned the pump, but it's still making a ton of noise, presumably because of the high resistance of the system (though I don't remember it being this noisy originally...).
• I was happy to see one of my six golden kuhli loaches appear, and even happier to see it disappear (which presumably meant it had find a suitable place to hide again and would not be stressed out). It's barbels looked great.
• It was neat to see all five of my otos shoaling together during the refill, though it reminded me to do future refills with warmer water so as to not stress out the fish with a temperature swing (I am worried that the behavior was stress-induced).
• I'll get a better idea with the full lights on, but the plants look good for the most part, they're just all closed up, either because that's what plants do at night, or they're straining upwards in hopes that they can find some light. I imagine it will resolve itself in the morning.

One of my co-workers is interested in adding plants to his goldfish tank, so I might start him off with some of my extra java moss, and we'll see if his goldfish doesn't eat it all. If that goes well and the rest of my tank goes well, I can give him additional cuttings (watersprite, I'm looking at you), that won't make the cut for my 5 gallon.