Hi Ingrid,

Do you line the entire bottom of the tank with river rock? If not, do you
leave the bottom of the tank bare? I would imagine that it wouldn't look
very good to have a bare bottom?


wrote in message
...
get rid of the gravel completely. see removing gravel
http://www.mu.edu/~buxtoni/puregold/...re1.htm#GRAVEL
get a whisper 3 for every 20 gallons.
use river rock. attach your siphon to a long hose, there are some hoses
are very
light weight, clean once a week as before, but gunk is easy to clean
around the river
rock just push the river rock out of the water.
persistently high nitrates are due to rotting organic material somewhere
in the tank
system. it can ALSO be the filter needs to be rinsed out.
keeping nitrates at or below 20 ppm is a balancing act... balance between
water
changes and feeding. higher quality, higher protein, lower filler food ..
food with
some sort of fish, shrimp or krill in the first couple ingredients and
fish type oils
(most of these good foods need to be kept in the freezer or the oils go
rancid).
these kind of foods leave less crap behind that fouls the tank. with
higher quality
foods much, much less can be fed and the fish keep growing. for a 6 inch
fish 3-4
flakes of aquadine twice a day is all that is needed. fish got short
intestines so
large dollops of food go in and come out mostly without being digested.

you are correct to do daily water changes. Add 1 teaspoon of salt per 5
gallons.
Use rock salt with no additives. this will perk him up as well. Ingrid


(Kellbot) wrote:
Right now Bob the Oranda seems stressed because of it. He still gets
excited and tries to eat my hand whenever I open the tank lid, but
lately he's been spending more time chilling out in the corners behind
his miniature greek ruins, or just sort of poking around the main part
of the tank, rather than his usual jackrabbit-on-speed antics. I think
I'm going to cut back on feeding and start doing 30% daily changes
until he perks up.


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