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Chasing Sanity

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In the next few months I will be upgrading my 20L tank to a 70L tank. Yay!

So far I have planned:

3 Male guppies

9 Female guppies (any spawn will go in the outdoor pond)

6 Lyre-tail Mollies in various colours.

Is that too many fish for a tank that size? Also I'm not sure which I should use out of gravel or river-sand. After the great guppy massacre of 2009, I'm a bit more wary of using gravel but I'd like a black bottom so I have no idea. My tank will be planted but I seem to have trouble keeping plants alive, even if they have roots.

What should I do?

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The mollies will get quite large (are they balloon or standard?), but if you have a good filter with a decent turnover and large area for media room they should be OK in 70L. It is a wee bit squishy, but you can always rehome as they grow if they need the space.

Gravel is easier to clean, and I say that as someone who has tried river sand, beach sand, and black glass sand. You can get natural black gravel fairly easily. :rolleyes:

What light do you have? What plants did you try so far? Some are hardier than others, and some shops sell land plants as aquatics. You may just have had plants that were unsuited to your situation.

:D

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I'm looking at an Elite Hush 20 for a filter. I'm deeply clueless on lights and finding any useful fish books in Darwin is proving to be hard! The mollies are just standards.

I've got some ferny looking plant in there at the moment, I have no idea what it is and no aquatic plant site seems to have it. I've got a smaller amazon sword living in our plant/tadpole tank to use when this one dies.

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After the great guppy massacre of 2009, I'm a bit more wary of using gravel but I'd like a black bottom so I have no idea.

I don't know what happened to your guppies but I have two tanks with guppies breeding in them, one has gravel and the other river sand. I haven't had a problem with either one. The one with river sand has also just yielded 13 albino cory fry which I just moved into their own growout tank, complete with river sand. Guppies can be very sensitive to water quality and temperature. They are also highly suseptable to columnaris.

Like you, I never seemed to have much luck with plants and I couldn't be bothered with Co2 and expensive lighting. Go with hardy, low to moderate light plants like java fern, java moss and anubias. They don't have to be planted in the substrate, just tie them to rocks or driftwood. I bought 4 bunches of Java fern from someone Lea about 4 years ago, I now have it in 2 four foot tanks, one six footer, all my betta tanks, both growout tanks and floating loose in a 130 litre octagonal tank that I use to store surplus plants in. I also have several enormous clumps of Java moss in all of the larger tanks

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It was gravel that no matter how much I rinsed, colour came off when it was in the tank.

This is the plant I've got

DSCF2349.jpg

DSCF2348.jpg

This fish really seem to like it, and it's pretty but I have no idea what it is!

I saw my first white clouds at the LFS yesterday and really liked them, so might get a bunch of them instead of a ton of mollies.

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Orange dissolving gravel doesn't sound pleasant at all. :) The gravel I use is your basic washed small river pebbles. As for the plant, I agree, Wisteria. Supposedly easy to grow but I have never had much luck with it, but then I can kill a plastic plant :)

Good luck with your tank setup. You can get aquarium safe black gravel but you may have to ask your LFS to order it for you.

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Finding decent sand here is hard... may have to get gravel after all. There's a aquarium shop here that actually knows about fish, and they carry a huge range of natural gravel and they're always cheaper than the chain pet-shops! I went to one yesterday that were charging $7.15 for male guppies, and they weren't particularly fancy! Plus I stopped my dead fish count at 10 and that was only after about 5 tanks, so there's no way I could buy fish from them. I'm thinking of getting my fish from livefish.com.au, at least the harder to find ones anyways.

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Was the gravel coloured marble chips by any chance? When hubby first set up his tank to cycle he used them. We didn't have coloured water, but the ph went through the roof and I couldn't buffer it down. I hadn't paid attention to what he'd used and it took me a fortnight to realise it was marble in there and figure out what was going on. (Sudden synaptic paths opened and flashed me back to high school science and the study of acid rain and how it was destroying ancient sculptures.) The owner of the shop told hubby that "ph isn't even measured by knowledgeable fish keepers anymore". While I agree it's not the most important thing, I think a ph of 8.5 would have shocked just about anything we'd put in there. Needless to say, we don't shop there anymore.

Where are you located CS? If you add your location to your member stats others may be able to point you to reputable suppliers in your area.

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I'm in darwin, we've got 4 pet-shops and an aquarium shop. The gravel was decorative gravel from Bunnings, (basically painted rocks?) so I'm guessing it's my fault it leached colour. I was having major PH problems with that gravel in, no matter what I did to bring it down, an hour later it would be high again. Since the change to the old ugly gravel things are level and normal.

How do people manage to get glass covers for tanks if they have a hang on filter?

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I have mentioned in a post before that my tap water was a stable ph7 for the first 18 months or so of me having fish and then one day it was 8 now 8.5 possibly higher but my chart doesn't even read it that high. Lucky I test as I keep discus and that would have been a disaster. I don't have much trouble growning plants, even tiger lotus. I only have a basic lighting setup. I use dino dung under the gravel and add their ferts to the water as well. The only thing I haven't had any luck with is needle ludwigger and ambula but I think that's because the mollies eat it. :)

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it's 2 foot (610x305x380), I just bought a T5 double reflector off eBay for $50 that has 14 Watt 10000K spectrum (1 x white 1 x blue) globes. I figure getting the right reflector is important, even if it may come with insufficient tubes. I'm still trying to decide on a filter, my brother has suggested a canister filter, but I don't understand how they work.

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