Leaderboard

I know, I’ve been meaning to get one for over a year. Glad I finally did. Unfortunately, I tested the tank today and it came out with a TDS of 40… which is great fun, because it means either the test kit is measuring GH and KH wrong, or the TDS pen I just bought doesn’t work (as 1 degree hardness is equivalent to 17.9ppm, and TDS should include measures of hardness like GH and KH). Yay.

I am surprised you did not have a TDS pen until now. Looks like you will need to start looking into remineralising soon too.

Yeah, we’re trying to sort out the pH and KH with this ‘ageing water w/ peat moss’ idea, so hopefully that’ll work. I also got a TDS pen this weekend, and I haven’t had time to measure that tank yet (just their QT tank, which is perfect for every parameter!), but I’ve been playing around with it and I was surprised to find that I only have 26ppm of total dissolved solids coming out of the tap! So when doing water changes, my tap water serves almost as RO water! I think this may be why my previous attempts with shrimp have not gone very well. I was doing 20% water changes with tap water, which must have been really messing with the tds. I think with this new tank, we’ll be doing very slight water changes and trying to match parameters as best we can. And with my shrimp tanks at home, I’ll be going back to taking water from my main tank for water changes (and again doing very slight WCs). To be honest, that could explain why the times that I had no losses were when I had long periods where I wouldn’t touch the tank. We should be fine, it’s not constant, just little rays of direct sunlight that slip through the trees every once in a while. But it looks fabulous when that comes through. Yeah well if we do decide to add them, it would be in a while once the colony has stabilised and started growing. And once the plants have grown in. In terms of the shrimp, the guy failed to respond when I asked for his address multiple times (gumtree seller), so I guess we’ll see if we end up actually getting those mischlings. I’m hoping it was an accident, and I can pick them up next weekend.