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Simple chronological updates on my tanks, and struggles with them.
Well, as you can see, things are returning to normal after all the aquarium and fish excitement I’ve had over the last few weeks. From the pic below you can see the the fish seem fairly normal after my nearly killing them with a CO2 overdose last week. Two of the high bodied leopard discus actually spawned a couple of days ago. And a couple of the cobalt discus are doing their serious tail shimmy - let’s get it on - dances right now. I take breeding as a sign of health and well being. So I’m happy for that.
The tank is going through some changes. My CO2 tank ran dry, just as I was messing with the pH probe, and I shut off the lights and fert injections for a few days until I could get a replacement CO2 cylinder. So I’m leaving the ferts off for a little while, just to see how the tank (and algae) reacts.
In order to fight the algae problem, I’ve raised my lights by three inches, reduced my temperature to 82 (though lights and pumps still raise it a few degrees during the day), have reduced my total photo period to seven hours, and spit it up with a 90 minute siesta. So that’s three and a half hours light, hour and a half dark, and another three and a half hours light.
Lots of people will tell you that a siesta is bunk. It may be. But I also know my most algae free tanks has siesta. Coincidence? I wouldn’t know. But I know it won’t hurt.
The plants are growning back after my bone-headded huge trim. But with the ferts and lights dialed back, they are taking their time about it. But that’s OK. The algae’s kind of chilling too. And that’s the goal.
This is only an hour or two after my last post. WOW! What an hour!
After my prior diatribe of poor management of my tank, I went back to my tank to see my poor fish in BAD SHAPE!
This was a surprise! I’m used to happy, spawning fish. But I went back to the tank to see my fish laying on thier sides on the bottom! Or at the top of the tank, sucking air it the surface! Or worse… just floating randomly around in the current!
Can you say “total panic”? I can. And I did.
While this has never happened to me before, the first action is to correct the water! What went wrong can wait until later…
So I hooked a garden hose up to on of the Ocean Clears to get as much of the “bad” water out as quickly as possible. At the same time I whipped out the seldom used Python hose out of the closet, checked the tap water temperature, tossed the requisite amount of Seachem Prime in the tank, and started blasting tap water into the tank as the old stuff drained.
After a while it was clear that the water level was not changing quickly. So I shut off the new water, and just let the bad water drain. By the time it got to about 15% normal water volume. I stopped draining, and commenced fill only.
The tank is about 1/2 filled now, and many of the fish are swimming somewhat normally. At least they don’t act as if they are dying. But what the total impact is only time will tell. I guess I’ll finish this filling up, confirm that my water parameters are OK, and go to bed. It’s after midnight now.
Hopefully in the morning I will see a tank full of recovering fish. I don’t want to contemplate the alternative. I’ve had these fish a few years now, and until tonight I did not realize how great the attachment was. My wife even came down from her slumber, just to check to see - in hopes that everything would be OK.
I guess we all love these fish.
I’ll let you know the outcome as soon as I know. But for now - and figuring this out has NOT been the immediate priority - it appears that as I was diagnosing the performance of my pH probes, I forgot to turn off the CO2 injection. So somewhere along the line I stuck a pH probe in some 7.01 solution for testing, and the CO2 injection went wild trying to bring the pH down. When in actual fact the tank pH was fine, but the 7.01 solution I was testing caused the CO2 injection to go wild, and start a completely avoidable pH crash.
I cannot believe I was so stupid. But it looks like I was.
Tomorrow we will see the impact. Time for bed now. I hope the fish will be OK. 
Well, every once in a while if you highly automate your tanks, you will dip your toe into the cold, cold waters or highly automated hell. Welcome in! I’m there right now, and going for a swim…
My lack of posting for a couple of weeks is not for lack or desire. Nor has it been because the tank looks like crap, and I’m just ashamed to show it to you. No. The tank DOES look like crap. And I AM ashamed. But honesty and candor require that I show it to you. But I don’t have time now to deal with picture taking, Photoshop, and all that hoowie. But I’m happy to tell you about the tank.
A few weeks ago I was agonizing over the fact that I let the plants go too long without trimming. And that the deep trimming that neglect necessitated was a really bad bedfellow with the fact that I needed to change a filter. Well it gets worse…
I’ve got a pH controller, and a probe for it that I have mounted in-line, so it is perpetually sampling my water for pH and adjusting CO2 injection accordingly. This particular pH probe - Lab grade from Neptune Systems - was both expensive, and also WORTH it because it has been humming along for almost a year without any significant deviation from my other pH meters. In other words, while the probe vendors recommend calibration on a VERY regular basis (say monthly if you are lazy like me) this little puppy has been RIGHT on target for months on end. And being human, I’ve been ignoring it… as if it would be correct forever.
Well the deep algae on every surface in my tank caused me to quickly surmise that something FUNDAMENTAL was wrong. And at the very least, it was my pH readings, and subsequent lack of CO2 injection.
Now that does not mean that I did not cut my biofilter back too far. I did. A major trim of plants coupled with a massive plant trim was pure foolishness. But following this up with too little CO2 because of an out-of-calibraton probe was just stupid.
So, my tank looks like crap. Pics to follow soon.
That said, I don’t have a lot of progress to talk about. Nor pics to show you. My extra time - for what little there has been, has been consumed with stupid and time-consuming scraping the sides of the tank to clean the MASSIVE quantities of GDA, and trimming the RIDICULOUS amount of plant leaves of the same affliction. All in all, between the trimming, tank cleaning, and pH probe testing, I’d guess that I’ve wasted AT LEAST 8 hours on this crap.
So much for a low-maintenance planted discus tank.
Will post much more later after I dig myself out of planted discus tank hell.
Cheers - Steve
A couple of weeks ago I posted saying I wasn’t going to trim my plants. Big mistake.
The hygro was growing out of the top, and was long overdue for a trim. Unfortunately I let it get too tall - too leggy. So when I cut it last week, I cut it way back. But the leaves that were exposed by that process were too old. When they were exposed to the direct light this week GSA set up on them badly.
That was made worse by the fact that I spent weeks without cleaning the GDA off the sides and let it get too bad. I had it where I could do a quick scrape every few days and the tank was fine. But by waiting weeks it got thick, and when I cleaned it it went all over the tank. Including those old leaves on the hygro. And it hit the wysteria pretty hard too. And because I let it get so out of hand before I cleaned it, it was unusually thick on the tank walls by the end of the week.
All this might have been avoided if I hadn’t neglected regular maintenance.
But I replaced the filter media on one of my OceanClears. Big mistake after a huge trim. The trim removes biomass, and the filter change took out half of my bio-filtration too, Stupid. But I did it. I wonder how long I have to be in this hobby before I stop making newbie mistakes?
So I ripped all the stems out, and the hygro, and cut it way, way back. And I removed the Ludwigia repens too. I hated to do that - I love that plant. But it’s getting warm in the summer weather - 85 degrees in the tank every afternoon - and it is just not dealing with the heat. All its old growth is algae covered, so it’s better out of the tank.
What went back in the tank was only 1/3 the plant mass of what came out. Now my tank has precious little biomass. That’s potential trouble. So I’m anxious to see what this week is going to bring.
Live and learn I guess.
Well, the Green Dust Algae got pretty nasty. I hadn’t touched the tank in weeks, and it looked like it, so I broke down Friday nite and cleaned it. There was so much GDA that after scraping it off gave the water a strong green tint. So I did an 80% water change too, just to get most of it out. And I’m still having trouble with some kind of green algae growing on the sand. So I gravel vacuumed up the top 1/2″ or so, Chloroxed it, and put it back.
I’ll have to go back and check my records I think it had been three weeks since I touched the tank. And doing so created a maintenance effort that was probably 3 hours in total. A good bit of work I’m afraid. Or, I suppose you could say 1 hour a week for 180 gallon aquarium isn’t too bad. Especially with plants and discus.
I obviously trimmed the plants while I was at it. It felt like a pound or two of trimmings were pulled out. Tank looks better now though.
These photos really look aweful. The depth of field - or rather lack thereof - makes the tank look flat. I need to get a better camera, because I can tell you these boring, unidimensional pictures, just don’t show what the tank looks like in real life… where you can see the layers of depth. It also makes the fish look like they’ve got no room, when in actual fact they’ve to all kinds of room. So one day, a new camera. But for now, here’s a few pics of my fish.
I’ve got two types of discus, Cobalts and High-bodied Leopards. Both sets purchased from Dan at Gulf Coast Discus. If you look hard, or click on on of the pics to pull up a larger shot, you can see that one of the Leopard’s tails is a bit raggedy. I’ve got two fish that get beat up by the other fish. The ragged tailed Leopard, and my runt Cobalt. I’m not sure the runt can be seen in these pics - he’s hanging to the background where it is safe.
Anyway, here’s some pics.
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