Hello everyone!
I was looking for advice so I started reading about the subject, and I ended up finding this very interesting forum.
We (I mean my family here, because it was the children who asked for an aquarium) are novices and in recent weeks have we gone from being super-happy with the aquarium, to be concerned...
Now the situation is much better, after several late night reading and some changes.
I will explain the story, which will also serve as a presentation of our very small nano:
April 2011
We bought a 28 liter (7.4 gallon) aquarium kit with a backpack filter
(capable of 120 litres/hour). It came with a PL light that we did not use except for holidays, when there was absolutely no light in the house for 2 weeks.
We had it 2.5 years with freshwater fish, and finally we decided not to replace them with the intention, when the last one died , to switch to saltwater.
During this time we had quickly found that the pet shop we had bought it from had little or no idea. We started buying from another shop, this time specialized in aquaria, and they seemed to be very good.
Oct 19, 2013
As the last survivor had left us, we went to the shop and came out with what they told us we would need for our new “reefâ€: live rock (2.6 kg or 4.4 lbs) that had, attached to it, a green long leaved plant that, according to Internet photos is (or greatly resembles ) Prolifera Caulerpa, ready-made saltwater, fine-grain aragonite sand (I have about 1 inch of sand base), a 25W heater, a rather bleak adhesive thermometer (hard to read), small bacteria vials, and “the saltwater version†of a LED light with combined white and blue LED (we thought the old PL light was broken). As for the freshwater tank we had only purchased some fish then thrown in some stones, I left the store with shaking legs
(or should I say, wallet) but by then we were determined to have a micro - sea with some little clownfish and it did not stop us.
Following shop instructions, we set it up and left it there for a couple of weeks (at that moment I did not know that this is what you call cycling , although now I know that it should be much longer).
We were very happy to see some "spontaneous" small critters: a couple of very small nassarius snails , and in the morning, when we turned the light on, we used to see a pair of black and orange small worms wandering around, and some tiny crustacean that you could barely see .
We were very pleased, still no fish and we already had more variation and movement, and some colorful stones than before,m when we had only plain dead rocks and a couple of freshwater fish.
Nov 05, 2013
We have water analyzed in the shop, everything is OK and so we told to buy some nails: two Nassarius reticular and a Cypraea Annulus. They asked us to come back in a week with a water sample to analyze
Nov 12, 2013
Water Analysis in the store, everything is OK and we are told that we can progress: two tiny Amphiprion Occellaris (about 15mm)
Nov 15, 2013 We are “allowed†by the shop to purchase an anemone (yes, I know what you are thinking about size and cycling time, but I did not know anything by then). It was a small (diameter is about 2 inches) BTA or Entacmaea Quadricolor. Pretty, by the way... and very expensive. It was lovely for some time, and now it still is, but not all the time... This is one of the two problems we have run into. It started to get pretty ugly every day, in the afternoon. The first time I noticed it , I went to buy a kit for analyzing nitrate, it was OK. Still, I changed a third of the water.
We have a timer, until 10 days ago we had it set for 8 hours of white light from 14:00 to 22:00 (so it was on mainly when we are at home).
The temperature that I had set was 27 degrees...
The aquarium is in the kitchen. The place where we felt better because we had some space there (you have to forget your average room for a moment and think of European size apartments), because playing with water is not dangerous to the wooden floor of the rest of the house, and because it is where we spend most of the time when we are at home (apart from the lounge but do not have much room there and I don’t think our little friends like loud music...) .
Sunlight is low, there, in fact the kitchen needs artificial light most of the day because it faces a very small inner courtyard.
We control the water level frequently, and refill with osmosis water from the home system.
We changed a third of the water every three weeks, using salt water purchased in the shop) and pour a vial of bacteria every water change .
The issue is that , from one day to another , a brown coating appeared in the sand , which spreaded to the leaves of the Caulerpa, the live rock, and glass walls (that I clean frequantly with a magnetic device).
Dec 16, 2013
I buy another snail, a Strombus. In the shop tell me they eat algae, but does not seem to do much more than moving it when it moves (and it does not move much). They say there's a fish that would remove it quickly but I cannot put it into a 28-liter tank with 2 clownfish. They also mention a starfish, which so far I have not bought .
Also, following the advice of the store, I reduce the light hours to 6, adding some blue light.
As I said, Anemone spent times with its tentacles shrunk or covering itself with the foot or with the " stomach " (or whatever the inner white part is called) well in sight . At noon, with the LED light still off it is usually looking OK, it seems that when it has had some hours of light, it gets fed up.
The small clownfish do not stop all day, and they eat like crazy as soon as I feed them something, so they appear to be fine.
At that point, our priorities were getting rid of the diatomea, and, more important, be sure that the BTA was fine.
I did some research and took some action based on what I read.
Some actions I caould not take, like switching to a bigger tank, and it was too late to correct the extremely short cycling...
Here’s what I did:
- Buy a kit to analyze more parameters (pH and phosphates)
- After buying a better termometer and seeing it rise to 28 or 29 degree (C), immediately lowering the temperature to 25
- Set the timer to 8.5 hours of light. I had reduced to 6 because, as per the shop explanations, I understood that algae was growing due to excess light, but now I read in forums that if it were the case, it would be green algae, not brown... and the anemone needs more light, according to the guy in a new shop I have started visiting, whose advice is more consistant to what I read in forums.
-I analyzed phosphates and they were 10 ppm. I have put some product to reduce them.
-I now check pH, last time it was 8
- I did a water change, and started to do it once a week. I siphoned the algae from bottom when taking water out. The nitrates went from 25 ppm to 10 ppm, that time.
- Due to the size of the tank, I cannot use a pump to create current, so I added a second hang-on filter to add some water movement.
- Having read that it can be excess phosphate (and I had a little excess as I mentioned bedore), and this may be due to excess food (if I understood correctly), I reduced the amount of microbeads ( say micro because they are sooo small , much more than a grain of brown sugar ) I feed the ocellaris... I do not know how I can tell if I’m starting to starve them... I feed them once a day from Sunday night to Thursday. On Friday, they have special dinner: mysis (I just learned that I have to rinse it well to get rid of phosphates, I’ll do that today). And on Saturday, I’m sorry but they fast
(I was advised that by the shop).
- The BTA is fed a smallish piece of frozen shrimp (I put it in osmotic water to unfreeze it for a while) every other week.
There has been noticeable improvement in the BTA looks, in the 3 or 4 days since all these changes.
What do you think? Any advice will be welcome. If I’m doing something wrong, or I give the wrong name to something, PLEASE correct me, I’m glad to be able to learn and I don’t easily take offense
Thank you for all the leaning I already did from you, and for any comment you may have.
Xavi
PS: Sorry for my English, as, apart from my not perfect knowledge, I “GoogleTranslated†a post that I wrote in another language, then corrected and completed the info, I may have missed something.
If you are curious, I'm from Catalonia, and I live in a town 10 km from Barcelona.
I was looking for advice so I started reading about the subject, and I ended up finding this very interesting forum.
We (I mean my family here, because it was the children who asked for an aquarium) are novices and in recent weeks have we gone from being super-happy with the aquarium, to be concerned...
Now the situation is much better, after several late night reading and some changes.
I will explain the story, which will also serve as a presentation of our very small nano:
April 2011
We bought a 28 liter (7.4 gallon) aquarium kit with a backpack filter
(capable of 120 litres/hour). It came with a PL light that we did not use except for holidays, when there was absolutely no light in the house for 2 weeks.
We had it 2.5 years with freshwater fish, and finally we decided not to replace them with the intention, when the last one died , to switch to saltwater.
During this time we had quickly found that the pet shop we had bought it from had little or no idea. We started buying from another shop, this time specialized in aquaria, and they seemed to be very good.
Oct 19, 2013
As the last survivor had left us, we went to the shop and came out with what they told us we would need for our new “reefâ€: live rock (2.6 kg or 4.4 lbs) that had, attached to it, a green long leaved plant that, according to Internet photos is (or greatly resembles ) Prolifera Caulerpa, ready-made saltwater, fine-grain aragonite sand (I have about 1 inch of sand base), a 25W heater, a rather bleak adhesive thermometer (hard to read), small bacteria vials, and “the saltwater version†of a LED light with combined white and blue LED (we thought the old PL light was broken). As for the freshwater tank we had only purchased some fish then thrown in some stones, I left the store with shaking legs
(or should I say, wallet) but by then we were determined to have a micro - sea with some little clownfish and it did not stop us.Following shop instructions, we set it up and left it there for a couple of weeks (at that moment I did not know that this is what you call cycling , although now I know that it should be much longer).
We were very happy to see some "spontaneous" small critters: a couple of very small nassarius snails , and in the morning, when we turned the light on, we used to see a pair of black and orange small worms wandering around, and some tiny crustacean that you could barely see .
We were very pleased, still no fish and we already had more variation and movement, and some colorful stones than before,m when we had only plain dead rocks and a couple of freshwater fish.
Nov 05, 2013
We have water analyzed in the shop, everything is OK and so we told to buy some nails: two Nassarius reticular and a Cypraea Annulus. They asked us to come back in a week with a water sample to analyze
Nov 12, 2013
Water Analysis in the store, everything is OK and we are told that we can progress: two tiny Amphiprion Occellaris (about 15mm)
Nov 15, 2013 We are “allowed†by the shop to purchase an anemone (yes, I know what you are thinking about size and cycling time, but I did not know anything by then). It was a small (diameter is about 2 inches) BTA or Entacmaea Quadricolor. Pretty, by the way... and very expensive. It was lovely for some time, and now it still is, but not all the time... This is one of the two problems we have run into. It started to get pretty ugly every day, in the afternoon. The first time I noticed it , I went to buy a kit for analyzing nitrate, it was OK. Still, I changed a third of the water.
We have a timer, until 10 days ago we had it set for 8 hours of white light from 14:00 to 22:00 (so it was on mainly when we are at home).
The temperature that I had set was 27 degrees...
The aquarium is in the kitchen. The place where we felt better because we had some space there (you have to forget your average room for a moment and think of European size apartments), because playing with water is not dangerous to the wooden floor of the rest of the house, and because it is where we spend most of the time when we are at home (apart from the lounge but do not have much room there and I don’t think our little friends like loud music...) .
Sunlight is low, there, in fact the kitchen needs artificial light most of the day because it faces a very small inner courtyard.
We control the water level frequently, and refill with osmosis water from the home system.
We changed a third of the water every three weeks, using salt water purchased in the shop) and pour a vial of bacteria every water change .
The issue is that , from one day to another , a brown coating appeared in the sand , which spreaded to the leaves of the Caulerpa, the live rock, and glass walls (that I clean frequantly with a magnetic device).
Dec 16, 2013
I buy another snail, a Strombus. In the shop tell me they eat algae, but does not seem to do much more than moving it when it moves (and it does not move much). They say there's a fish that would remove it quickly but I cannot put it into a 28-liter tank with 2 clownfish. They also mention a starfish, which so far I have not bought .
Also, following the advice of the store, I reduce the light hours to 6, adding some blue light.
As I said, Anemone spent times with its tentacles shrunk or covering itself with the foot or with the " stomach " (or whatever the inner white part is called) well in sight . At noon, with the LED light still off it is usually looking OK, it seems that when it has had some hours of light, it gets fed up.
The small clownfish do not stop all day, and they eat like crazy as soon as I feed them something, so they appear to be fine.
At that point, our priorities were getting rid of the diatomea, and, more important, be sure that the BTA was fine.
I did some research and took some action based on what I read.
Some actions I caould not take, like switching to a bigger tank, and it was too late to correct the extremely short cycling...
Here’s what I did:
- Buy a kit to analyze more parameters (pH and phosphates)
- After buying a better termometer and seeing it rise to 28 or 29 degree (C), immediately lowering the temperature to 25
- Set the timer to 8.5 hours of light. I had reduced to 6 because, as per the shop explanations, I understood that algae was growing due to excess light, but now I read in forums that if it were the case, it would be green algae, not brown... and the anemone needs more light, according to the guy in a new shop I have started visiting, whose advice is more consistant to what I read in forums.
-I analyzed phosphates and they were 10 ppm. I have put some product to reduce them.
-I now check pH, last time it was 8
- I did a water change, and started to do it once a week. I siphoned the algae from bottom when taking water out. The nitrates went from 25 ppm to 10 ppm, that time.
- Due to the size of the tank, I cannot use a pump to create current, so I added a second hang-on filter to add some water movement.
- Having read that it can be excess phosphate (and I had a little excess as I mentioned bedore), and this may be due to excess food (if I understood correctly), I reduced the amount of microbeads ( say micro because they are sooo small , much more than a grain of brown sugar ) I feed the ocellaris... I do not know how I can tell if I’m starting to starve them... I feed them once a day from Sunday night to Thursday. On Friday, they have special dinner: mysis (I just learned that I have to rinse it well to get rid of phosphates, I’ll do that today). And on Saturday, I’m sorry but they fast
(I was advised that by the shop).- The BTA is fed a smallish piece of frozen shrimp (I put it in osmotic water to unfreeze it for a while) every other week.
There has been noticeable improvement in the BTA looks, in the 3 or 4 days since all these changes.
What do you think? Any advice will be welcome. If I’m doing something wrong, or I give the wrong name to something, PLEASE correct me, I’m glad to be able to learn and I don’t easily take offense
Thank you for all the leaning I already did from you, and for any comment you may have.
Xavi
PS: Sorry for my English, as, apart from my not perfect knowledge, I “GoogleTranslated†a post that I wrote in another language, then corrected and completed the info, I may have missed something.
If you are curious, I'm from Catalonia, and I live in a town 10 km from Barcelona.
