corycatwoman (south american community)

[corycatwoman]

well, i have been moving around alot and had to break down my african tank. so now for a few months now ive had an empty 60 gallon. i got tired of it sitting there empty and i think im pretty stuck in my residence for awhile i see no harm in trying to get a set up again. i would of loved to kept my africans but i dont really wanna go through all of that frustration again.

so i cleaned everything out got my substrate and water column in the tank. added 8 live plants. 4 peacock ferns i have them in the center of the tank in a bush like formation. and 4 white ribbon swords. i have 1 cluster on each side of the tank. and between the external sword cluster and the peacock fern bush i have the other 2 sword plants. so if your looking directly at the tank you have a fern bush dead center and either side of it a sword plant. and on the far side edges i have another sword plants totalling my live plants to 8. but looking at the tank its only 5 clumps.

i have 4 GBR. 3 Keyhole. 1 Turquois jack. 1 Paradise gourami. and 2 boseman rainbows. 1 albino channel catfish. 1 manganuese. im aware that i will have to remove the last 2 stock listed fish but they will be fine for a little while as juveniles.

my concerns right now is. i used an instant cycling product that i havent used before. worked great for the initial 3 days. but sure enough after i started stocking fish. the ammonia spikes are taking place as they should of before the stocking(if the product i used was worth the money i spent on it) but either way 22 water changes and 1 and half weeks later i think i finally have a balence in my water chemistry. i have quite a bit of overflow from my HOB filter. im just not sure if thats enough oxygenation for my fish to be content. everyone at present moment is very alive and very happy and apear to be healthy.

Question. more like opinion.. would it be wise to get a bubble strip?


BTW pictures coming soon.

[Carl]

Question. more like opinion.. would it be wise to get a bubble strip?

Yes, as even though you likely are getting enough O2, this will allow for redundancy in case of a problem with your HOB filter.

The only negative I see is is CO2 is added, this would scrub it off quicker (but using a timer can help with this potential problem). That said, I do not think this is a concern at this point anyway.

Carl

[kagome]

I would agree with Carl that adding more aeration is never a bad thing and you never know when a filter is going to die on you while air pumps usually last a really long time with no problem. I've had filters conk out on me in the middle of the night in a tank where I had large fish, if it wasn't for the airstone those fish would have died on me before I even woke up and realized what was going on.
Plus, as an added bonus, the bubbles look really cool and there's all kinds of cool stuff you can get them to do with different shaped stones or other do-hickeys. Now that's a two-fer!