What is this!?

[Hadoken Kitty]

TLDR; I did a 75% water changed. Everyone is re-homed for now. Everything but two things had slime on them. Almost ready to be reintegrated. Gonna start making Dovahkiin eat pellets, whether he likes it or not.

I had a mini heart attack and re-homed everyone temporarily until the tank gets done cycling. I wasn't going to re-home them until my 50% water replacement turned into a 75%, and I decided that was enough low water for four animals to be annoyed at each other. :3
I went ahead and took out all of the plastic plants except Dovahkiin's log and the "plant" that was in it. Everything fake had slime on it, except those two pieces. So, I took it all out. Slime was all over the gravel. Mass cleaned that. The tank is full and already at 82F. Chlorinated and the water almost looks clear already. All the live plants got a nice pruning too.


Hopefully I can get Dovahkiin to start eating pellets. I've decided to start getting bullheaded about it. Two can play at this game. If he doesn't want to eat healthier, then I'm going to make him. >.<

[Hadoken Kitty]

Is it weird that I enjoyed cleaning my fish's tank? My baby pleco is a freaking ninja, though...

[callistra]

You should be doing a minimum of 20% weekly with siphon and the fact that you are showing ammonia and nitrites means you are not fully cycled. In addition to the weekly change you should do a 50% any time you see any of those show up. This is fish in..

If you're going to do fishless you need to find a source of ammonia.. either by adding fish food or by drops of pure ACE ammonia. I would start at 10 drops in a 20g and test daily and add more as needed to maintain 4ppm ammonia throughout the cycle. Once your nitrites spike I would cut back the drops in half.

[Hadoken Kitty]

This is with live plants as well? I was only slowing it down to try and not mess up the bio load, but if I'm not doing it right now....

Well, I already cleaned the tank out. So, I hope I at least did that right.

[callistra]

Yeah.. even with plants. The only thing to change is I would only siphon around the plants and not disturb any planted areas of gravel.

[Hadoken Kitty]

alright. well the tank was going to be cleaned today anyways. wow i'm glad you caught me before it was too late. thank you.