Any fish geeks here?

Having to re-cycle the tank is the last thing you want to do. You should do everything to avoid that at all costs. They sell products that are supposed to make it cycle in a couple of days but from my experience even with those products your probably looking at a couple/few weeks. It says it has all the bacteria necessary in it, and it may help but I just know from experience that it's really not possible to cycle it that fast.

The way I cycle is to get some pure ammonia from the hardware store that doesn't contain any soap or surfactants and add enough ammonia to get a test reading of several ppm up to 5 ppm ammonia in the tank. Wait and eventually it will go down. Keep adding ammonia to keep several ppm of ammonia in the water until the nitrite level spikes. Keep adding ammonia to keep a reading of ammonia to feed the bacteria. When nitrite level goes down to 0 ppm and stays there don't add any more ammonia and wait until nitrite and ammonia are both 0 ppm. You may want to do a partial water change if there is a high nitrATE level from cycling, then you can add fish. The good thing about this method is you can build up a very large bacterial colony in the tank, since you can add enough ammonia to be equivalent to a fully populated tank of fish. Once the bacteria can handle that much ammonia you can add a bunch of fish at once and the biological system will be able to handle it

You can use these bacteria products if you want, I have, but they are kinda expensive and it can definitely be done without them. Nature kinda has its way of taking care of things.

 

No shit! Seriously! I just got rid of one tank...360 gallons. Glass. Guess how much interest there is in moving that.

 

360 gallons! Damn! I don't even think it would be possible for me to get something like that into my apartment. It would have to be put together inside, and of course I would be pretty worried about it.

Mine has 2 small chips on the corner. They are not cracks so they can't spiderweb out, and I filled it with epoxy resin. Everything I've read says that this will be okay as long as there's no actual crack that can spread through the glass but it still makes me kinda nervous sometimes so I keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't ever crack more. That would be a really bad situation if it suddenly busted and I'm sure the guys on the floor below me wouldn't be thrilled about it either, or the landlord.

 

Could I not take half the water with me and use it to start it back up?
I'm gonna do it quickly if I have to do, fish tank last thing to move, back up tanks ready for fish after they relocate and then move in the big tank, fill it up, fish back in and happy. >.>

 

Yes, take as much water as you can but taking the substrate and filter media is much more important than the water, and keeping both of those wet since that is where most of you biological filter lives. Try to do the thing as quickly as possible. I recommend no cleaning anything when you do this....except for when you drain the tank you do get to suck out a lot of really nasty shit that you could never really get to before which probably does some good.

 

Cool, thank you, will do. Maybe I'll leave everything in the water I keep then. =]
Now I also have 3 fighting fish in their own individual tanks, I never keep their water when I clean them out. They don't seem to mind though? I think they're pretty hardy fish. They'll chuck a sook for an hour or so afterwards but then they're back to normal.

 

You can take take one thing out, like the water, or the filter, or even the substrate and be okay even tho it might make things a little unstable. It's when you switch up everything at once that's a big problem because at that point it's basically like starting over with a new tank. I think you could probably get a brand new tank and start it immediately as long as you kept the substrate and the filter media or at least one of those. Of course it's still gonna be risky. The fish could die from stress or aggression towards each other if you keep them in the same container cuz they will get pretty pissed off about the whole ordeal. I think it is better to keep them in buckets rather than in bags but that is just my personal opinion since you can have a much greater volume of water. Of course fish are shipped in bags and come out just fine but that is my opinion. Be selective about which fish you house together, and put some plastic plants or something down in the buckets for them to make it as cozy as possible. They will probably appear stressed after this and may not eat so keep the light off for a while and let them chill.

 

My fish haul today: Some convicts (2 are pink convicts that are supposedly paired and have mated..we'll see about that), 1 oscar and 2 gar. They were sold as marbled gar but they are kind of small and I won't be able to say for sure for a while. And there is no such thing as a marbled gar. But I love gar. I might need to put them in a different tank though. They're in with some potential bruisers right now. So far, so good but they might be a little small to hang in there.

 

No more fish talk?

These little gar are cracking me up. They are tiny...only about 4 inches long. I tossed in a few medium sized Hikari Cichlid Gold pellets for some other fish and the gar are acting like I threw in live food for them. Trying to eat pellets as big as their heads. Silly fish! I bet they can eat them once they soften up though. It would actually be pretty cool to get them on pellets or something at this age. It will be a lot easier to feed them later.

 

What size tank do you have? Reading this makes me wanna go buy some more fish. I have about 10 cichlids and a pleco in a 60 gallon, I know I can put more but they are very territorial so I would need to do something better than whats goin on right now to add too many more fish. I just wanna buy every fish I see tho...especially the little ones I wanna buy them and watch them get big like the others did.

 

I have various sizes. I have 7 with water in them right now. No shortage of space. I kind of got out of the monster fish game a while back so some of my tanks are running but hold no fish. I used to have all sorts of cool stuff though. Stingrays, eels, large knife fish, large gars, etc. Taking care of all those big fish properly was a lot of work. I just got rid of my 360 gallon tank. For the time being, I'm going to keep everything else I have but when I eventually buy a different house I'm going to make sure there is plenty of room for really big stuff. Like...I want to maybe do something like a 4000-5000 gallon build.

But right now the gar are tiny but I have plenty of space to grow them out. Just when you think you're out....they suck you back in!!

 

Atm I have a bad ass looking 15L with a stacked up rock background, gravel, moss ball, aquatic bonsai and a single black moor goldfish.

Soon I will be getting a 3ft tank with custom rack. Big 250 heater and massive fluval filter. Its going to look sick! Going to have loads of plants and only shrimp in this tank. The plan is to try and breed shrimp for the first time.

 

This is my 3ft tank set up at the moment. It really hasn't changed even since I moved house I kept the same layout, just looked pretty tonight. Big Red tail is Störm. lil one is Thunder. Then one of my ugly cat fish.