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I was lucky enough to be given 4 pure TB Bluebolts at the beginning of December - they were given to me because I had mentioned I had every colour pure TB except the BB. I have quite a few Taitibee BB but no pure ones. I decided to keep these guys in a seperate tank from the other TB because they came from a line that bred only BB when bred to each other. Anyway we thought there might be 2 pair but definitely 1 female. I was very pleased to see her berried within a few weeks of getting her and settled in inpatiently to await the arrival of shrimplets. Imagine my acute disappointment when a couple of weeks later I saw her not berried -complete devastation. The BB's don't come out much during the day as there were only 4 in the tank and probably didn't feel safe. The girl came out a bit but didn't get berried again so today I thought as they didn't seem particularly happy I would put them into my main TB tank so they had company. The other TB haven't given me any BB so I would know the BB were from these guys initially. Anyway I caught out a very berried female- surprise number 1 and excitement plus- then I caught out a male - no surprise, then another male -oh well we weren't sure there were 2 pairs. I had taken out the plants and couldn't find the last shrimp which was very disappointing but I thought I better just double check the plants and sure enough there was this most gorgeous deep blue berried girl- surprise number 2- so maybe the first one didn't drop her eggs after all and I had been seeing a different girl . Anyway on to the next tank they went and they are already out and about- nothing like a bit of company to make them feel a bit more secure. Back to the empty tank and replacing the moss etc. now for surprise number 3 and one of those moments- sure enough once I was tidying up the tank i saw movement -blue movement -there were little baby - like very little baby - Bluebolts swimming around! so not only did my girl have her babies but she must have gotten berried again straight away. The sad side is now That I have moved the adults I can't really move them back straight away -even though my tanks are all very similar I don't want to take the chance that the girls might drop their eggs with 2 moves on the one day. So if the babies survive -my shrimplet survival rate these last 12 months have been excellent so they should survive- I will be overun with Bluebolts both pure and hybrid! I would never have dreamed of owning so many Blue bolts just a few short years ago - I'm very very happy- apart from having pulled a family apart -bring on the blues.

i had the exact same issue, it said it was neutral ph, but it wasnt.... and i thought the same thing, testing everything else but the gravel... what i did to make sure my gravel is inert, since i wont trust what they say now, is find a fish shop that has gravel out of bags, find some you like and see if you can take a handful home to test

id test your sand like your doing, i had that issue, i just left it over night in a super small amount of water, make sure you give it a good wash with the water that is your test water, check the ph before, then 1 day later your rain water is 5.6ph? thats abit weird for rain water i thought, TDS must be higher in it than normal how long have you had the drift wood in the tank soaking?

This often annoys me haha. What about if it wasn't caps but plastic valves that can be opened or closed? Also, if those valves had some sort of clip on feature. I often find myself trying to get the hose in the right place so it's sitting at the top of bucket when filling up. Even a suction cup could be attached to where the valve is. Cheap and easy fix :)

What a great suggestion. Currently we sell the systems with an optional add on to get our low range or multi range tds meters. I will get to work on pricing them with built-in inline TDS meters (bear in mind, this will bump up the price of the system)

I just got started on dwarf shrimps about 6 months ago. Before that, I have kept some type of fish all my many decades years of life. Just this month, I met a seasoned shrimp enthusiast who needed more room for his new Tibee shrimps. I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time and bought his entire stock of SSS crystal shrimps. Therefore, I need to be good at shrimp breeding and raising in a quick hurry so that this opportunity would not be wasted.

i live in fear that i wll lose the tiny little grey caps/plugs that go on the end of the outlet hoses when not in use. i think it would be good for future customers to get a spare of those thrown in with the initial purchase :-)

Hi all, I recently won the FSA RO unit through one of the competitions here on our forum and have promised to do a short write up/review of the product :) However, there is a bit of a delay as I had a bad start to the year health wise so have not felt like doing anything really haha. Feeling mostly better now so here is my short review of a fantastic product! :) Here is a link to the exact model I got from FSA: https://www.filtersystemsaustralia.com/store/index.php/reverse-osmosis-water-filter/aquarium-systems/aquarium-alkaline-drinking-water-combo-r-o-filter-system-di-resin-1-70dialk.html Firstly, I opted to go with the GT1-70DIALK which is the normal aquarium RO filter system but comes with an included attachment for drinking water because my family doesn't like the taste of the tap water so I figured two birds with one stone! No regrets so far. I'll start with the drinking water section, basically the water tastes much "fresher" than the tap water. PH comes out at 7 with a TDS of about 50 from memory (been a while since i set it up and tested, sorry), compared to 7.4ph and 80-100 TDS from the tap. I didn't do any further tests beyond this, and even those were just for fun really... Next up, the thing you actually care about! :D The aquarium RO section! My water to begin with is pretty good, however I wanted to have the ability to adjust pH easily and control TDS in different tanks. i.e. ~100-150TDS in my shrimp tanks, ~50-100 TDS in Dwarf Cichlid tanks, and so on. I will be doing this using Salty Shrimp GH+ minerals for now, but I do plan to use JayC's DIY re-mineralisation mix which he has posted up for us on the forum here. TDS coming out of the RO unit is always 0, with a ph of 7-7.2, gh/kh of 0 so easy to adjust up/down, etc. Airating the drum for a few hours brings the ph down to low 6, and if i drip the water through a handful of peat in a cup I can get the ph down to 5.8 while it fills up while the TDS remains < 5 with gh/kh of 0. I use the straight RO for the shrimp, and peat filtered for apistos. Both are remineralised to desired TDS using Salty Shrimp GH+. The FSA unit is quite easy to set up, and is literally plug and play which is fantastic as I was worried about set up especially since I live in a rental property so was not keen on messing with plumbing and so on. It comes with several attachments to connect to a tap, laundry tap, outdoor tap, etc. I keep mine in the laundry as this is where my breeding rack is. It was quite easy to set up, I had to use one of the adapters to get it to connect to my faucet in the laundry properly but this was not a problem. NOTE: There is a small bag which comes with an o ring or two (cant remember exactly) which needs to be inserted into the adapter prior to connecting to the tap. I did not see this initially and had water leaking through the connection, easy fix and my fault entirely for rushing setup (I was keen to get it going!). My tap in the laundry has a temp of approx 24 degrees most of the time (no hot water line in there) and I get approx 10L of good RO water per hour with a waste ratio of approx 1:1 or so last time i measured it (first 2-3 uses only). At the moment i just let the waste water run down the sink but I plan to hook it up to the washing machine or something eventually so it isn't wasting so much water. Haven't had the time/ability to work this out yet though. It is very easy to use and overall a great quality product, it is stable on its "feet" and so on. It sits on my washing machine which would move a fair bit when on, but it hasn't budged yet haha. (knock on wood i dont jynx myself now!). The taps in the above photo are set to release aquarium water but not drinking water, you cannot have both on at the same time (i assume this would cause issues as stated in the info booklet). When the blue tap is pointing in the direction of the tubing then that is the one that will release water. NOTE: One more thing that took me a bit of time and some questioning (and youtube watching) was getting the grey plug off... There is a small circle which you must press down with one finger (finger nail really) and then pull the plug out. It is quite easy once you know how to do it, before that was not quite easy to figure out having not used RO unit before! haha. I'll get a few photos of the process if anyone needs it! Also don't forget to let all the water run out of the tubing before putting the plug back in to prevent bacteria build up in the tubing. I have only one recommendation for FSA which is to add a little more info on the specs, etc on the website. At the moment it seems to be fairly generalised info between the different RO units which made it hard to figure out the exact details of the model, etc. Apart from that the unit is fantastic and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants one. They are well priced and do a great job. Thanks for reading and I hope you find the information useful! Sorry about the lack of photos but that really shows how easy it is to set up and use! @NoGi - Feel free to pass on my review link to the guys over at FSA :)

Where's the selfie with the shirt lol

Hello guys :) It's time for a some update :) First - shrimp foto: And now :) some movie: Thank You :)