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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
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