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My gender-bending Angelfish Oliver has died. She’s been ill, but undefinably so, thus accurate treatment wasn’t possible. Once the swelling begins it’s just a countdown until the end most of the time anyway. It’s one of those things… fish die, as does everything eventually, so I’m not really one to get terribly upset about it. The death is still distressing though, one additional little notch taken away from contentment and happiness.

I recently bought a pair of GE 9325K lamps along with adapters so I could use them in my fixture. I’m just linking to the images because the current thumbnailing in Wordpress is totally retarded.

This is the before image that uses four Current USA dual daylight 6700/10,000K lamps.

This is the after image that uses two GE 9325K lamps and two Current USA dual daylight 6700/10,000K lamps.

That is an amazing difference, isn’t it?

Oh, and it appears my five little baby mollies have either been eaten or sucked into the filter. My money would be on eaten. The female molly still looks pregnant, if she ever does give birth I’ll move them out so as to help the babies a bit. I might even go so far as to protect the filter inlet. It seems I’ve gone to enough trouble with these mollies already, so perhaps if I get a couple babies the money I’ve wasted on the dead ones won’t be so bad.

It seems time was mostly what I needed to get the lead on the hair algae outbreak.

The whole situation came about due to my unintentional neglect of the system. I say unintentional because there were things I ought to have been doing that I just wasn’t aware of. The biggest problem I believe was that the intake tube of my primary filter was somewhat clogged up. I know to keep a better watch on that now. There are also some areas where detritus tends to build up. I’ll be periodically doing a manual water change so that I can siphon the debris, along with occasionally using the vacuum attachment on the diatom filter. That seems to work incredibly well, in fact I believe it was instrumental in helping gain the upper hand. It allows one to do an almost limitless “gravel vacuum” without having to actually change any water. The superior suction over gravity really helps too.

I started dosing Flourish Excel this past Sunday. I’ve been following the directions up until today, where I did a double dose of the standard daily amount. The algae that would have normally been green and sort of slimy on the dwarf sag in the front was brown, I noticed that today. It almost looks like I have a sudden outbreak of diatoms.

The addition of the two additional blue gouramis has also really helped, the driftwood is impeccably clean. They seem to have taught the angelfish how to eat hair algae, in addition to reminding the existing gourami that it’s okay to eat it.

There is still some hair algae around some plants, but it has diminished considerably. I’m hoping with some additional trimming and staying on a good maintenance schedule things should clear up completely.

The three black mollies that remain in quarantine are doing okay. I tossed in a “fungus clear tank buddy” the other day. The two males are fairly well healed, at least visibly, but the female needs a bit more time. I’m not sure that medication really helped, I think the addition of the “herbal” Melafix and Pimafix was actually more useful. The female at least has recovered from the popeye. I swear those fish are about the least healthy things I’ve ever seen. They’ll look okay for a couple days and then suddenly they’ll be on death’s door.

I do have at least five baby mollies now. It seems every day I find another. The remaining female is still visibly pregnant, I’m not quite sure what is happening there. I figure the babies are from the other females that didn’t make it.

This is a photo of the Aquarium on 22 January 2008

I’ve been working pretty steadily on getting my aquarium back to a state where I can be happy with it. A couple of months ago I slipped in my regime somehow, or rather in a few various ways, and it went to hell. I’ve had a battle with hair algae for a while now, but I finally seem to be winning a little bit.

It seems this part of the year is when I have most interest in my aquarium. It just so happens that this is also when it is time to replace the light bulbs. I couldn’t really tell a difference between the way overdue replacement of the 2 year old bulb and the 1 year old bulb, so I figured everything was still okay.

I received a single replacement bulb, to replace the 2 year old bulb, and yes there is a definite difference. I’ll definitely need to start a replacement schedule. I labeled the replacement bulb with “JAN 2008″ so I’ll at least know when it was put in the fixture.

It turns out that I found a source for straight pin to square pin converters on eBay, so for roughly $16 shipped I can finally use those glorious GE 9325K bulbs in my Orbit fixture. It would all be much easier if GE made those bulbs in square pin, but alas they only make them straight pin configuration. It’s silly that there are two configurations anyway. The adapters apparently do work, at least according to posts on The Planted Tank, so I’m pretty excited. I dinged myself a little on shipping, because I just received my DFS order today and made another order… but they do have the GE 9325K bulbs on sale, so in a way it’s okay. I picked up two of the GE bulbs and a little bit of fish food.

I figure I’ll have a row of those, then a row of the 10,000/6700K bulbs, so two of each kind. I think that will finally give me the look I’ve been wanting. It seems that with just the 10,000/6700K bulbs there is a bit too much green/blue and not enough emphasis on the red. My cardinals almost look like they’re blue and purple.

I’ve been using the Diatom filter with the gravel vacuum attachment to do major hair algae removal. It seems to work extremely well, only I did quickly realize why the supplied attachment has such a tiny opening. The regular gravel vacuum is large and not particularly meant to be attached to something with such incredible sucking force like the Diatom XL…

I sucked up my Betta, Max. He lived through the ordeal… only to die of infection a couple of days later. Initially I tried to euthanise him, but apparently didn’t use enough anesthetic, as he woke up after a few minutes. It was then that I figured I ought to give him a shot at life. I still feel pretty horrible about the whole thing, it was an accident, but it was due to my negligence.

I’ve been trying to purchase Black Mollies to help deal with the hair algae, but their propensity for Columnaris infection and my soft water doesn’t particularly bode well for them. I have three left, of the five, but that’s after replacing about half of them. They’re all still in quarantine, the female is about to burst as she’s full of babies. One of the females that died apparently did it while birthing, as I have two tiny baby Mollies in there now. I do kind of like them as a fish, the males are especially attractive with the long fins, but I don’t see them as a long term possibility due to the relatively incompatible water conditions.

I would like to add Amano Shrimp, but I’m quite sure my Angels would devour them as a very expensive snack. I have been considering selling my two Angelfish, especially as I cannot find any others locally to help disperse the aggression between them.

In addition to the new light bulb I received today I also received a 2L bottle of Flourish Excel, for which when administered above regular dosages is supposed to help kill the algae. I figure if I attack this from all angles I’ll have more success.

I have fine tuned my fertilization routine, which realistically was fine to begin with, all the fiddling I’ve done with it was only wasting time over the last couple of months. I have, though, finally setup and turned on my autodosing system using Grasslin timers and peristaltic pumps. I have one pump running to measure out the micros, another to measure out the macros, and then a third that pumps a light solution of GH builder (potassium, calcium, and magnesium) to flush each fertilizer dosage through into the aquarium. It helps prevent the micros and macros from mixing in the line, which would be problematic with the tendency to form iron phosphate.

I haven’t added the autodoser line to the CO2 reactor yet. When I set it up I added an extra plug for just that purpose, so one access port for the CO2 and another for either topoff or fertilizer (or both). The thing that held me back all this time was that the auto topoff was a bit of an eyesore with the sensor in the tank. It was also slightly prone to moving, thus would make the difference between filling the aquarium up perfectly or overflowing it. One gallon of water on the floor while testing it was enough to warp the subfloor, now whenever you enter the room it feels like the floor dips — due to there now being a gap between the laminate floor and the subfloor. I’ll eventually put the dosing inline, but there is no reason to rush it. There really isn’t enough evaporation to really be concerned with auto topoff anyway. It would be nice to have a reserve tank of some sort and a pump I can manually control to do topoff, but that’s more like laziness.

I’m hoping the autodosing and the stability it brings will help considerably, as it was the one thing, other than feeding, which was really variable with me. I don’t have a set daily routine, thus fertilization was never set at a specific time during the day.

I have added five Otos, two Rubberlip Plecos, two Blue Gouramis, and four Glolight Tetras to the stocking; some of which are still in quarantine. That seems like a lot of fish on paper, but it really isn’t. It’s extremely difficult to find Cardinals here, and the Neons are all tiny Angelfish food, so I doubt I’ll be increasing their numbers past the combined total of nine. The Glolights were only five in number, due to some deaths along the line, so I’m boosting them a little. I originally bought them when I ran out of local Neons.

It’s so difficult to find the fish that I like. I originally started out with the idea of having Cardinals, Angelfish, and Blue Rams. I’ve discovered that I really like Gouramis, and along those lines I’ve been thinking of adding some Cherry Barbs (particularly if they are adept at eating hair algae). I suppose slowly switching over to a more Asian versus Amazonian aquarium.

I made a dew/light shield out of long sheets of craft foam and stiffened sticky felt. The sticky felt to act like flocking, and I chose the stiffened version to help support the rather large quantity of less than super sturdy foam. The stiffened felt has the nice side effect of being significantly easier to apply than the stretchier standard felt.

I used strong double-sided tape to join the sheets of craft foam together. I needed a few more inches than two sheets would provide, so there are three seams, one of which has the velcro.

To apply the felt I cut it into 4.5″ wide x 9″ long strips (cut the sheet in half lengthwise). I applied a strip of velcro on each end of the shield so as to be able to tighten the shield if necessary and also allow it to fold flat for travel.

With a little rolling up to curve the felt and release the flat tension a little, I now have a nicely round and sturdy light shield for about $7.

You’ll notice the rectangular cutout, that’s for the knob that suddenly became necessary.

Here you see both the main light shield and the miniature one for the finder scope. They’re constructed in relatively the same manner, except for the finder I made used much narrower strips so as to avoid making it too stiff.

I found this knob for next to nothing at Lowe’s. It’s made of ceramic and relatively light weight. I found really nice similarly sized metal knobs, but aside from the cold factor, they were seriously heavy. This knob is threaded for #8 screws.

I attached it using a 3/4″ long #8 screw through one of the holes that holds the ring onto the front of the scope. The metric threading for those screws isn’t quite the same as the #8, but it’s close enough that it can be made to fit with a bit more oomph using the screwdriver. I figured this was a good way of going, it’s in the right place and I didn’t need to drill a new hole in the OTA.

You’ll notice there’s a little gap because the knob is larger than the space available; I took up the gap with a pair of rubber washers, it’s nice and tight now and won’t scratch the finish of the tube. The white ring is a reflective tape I added to the front and back of the tube, helps notice where the scope is better in the dark.

I tried to use the clevis/cotter pin mod, but couldn’t find one long enough to work well with the magic (vs. super) sliders. I found that a 2.5″ hex bolt with a mix of nylon & steel washers, topped off with a lock nut, has been as close to perfect thus far. It’ll keep the ground board from falling off, eliminates wild wobbling, but provides no downward tension to effect azimuth motion. There is probably just a hair more than 1/32″ of an inch spacing, one more 1/16″ washer would fit, but then it’d be tight.

I superglued 3 1/16″ nylon washers together to go between the two bottom “plates” around the center bolt. It sort of acts like a slightly more sophisticated version of either the milk jug washers or the cdrom washers (which I had used before). I’m going to be on the look out for UHMW washers, or something similar that is slightly more slick.