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It might be time for complete tank clean. Gravel vac the substrate and rinse out the filter media (in the old tank water). 100% water change. Which means catching and housing the shrimp and plants in a temporary container/s. This should get your TDS to not go up so fast. All the debris and organics collected in the gravel and filter media is causing the TDS to to up quicker. I would aim for a TDS of 200 and try to maintain it there. A complete water change will reset certain minerals lost in a closed eco system. While the tank is empty, you can think about replacing the substrate as well. It's an option worth taking while the tank is empty. Just remember to keep the filter media under water while all this re-work is going on. Keeping it in the same container you have the shrimp is a good place to store the filter media while you are working on rebuilding the tank.

I don't know if this questions been asked before but I can't find anything using the search function. I'm about a year into keeping Red Cherrys and I still don't know what the optimum water parameters are for breeding. When I first started out I was getting loads of baby shrimp but now it seems that they've slowed right down. I used to use tap water, which is very hard here with a TDS of around 375, so I started using RO water and setting TDS at 250. I've just tested the tank for TDS (290), KH (9), and GH (4). Are these figures any good for the well being of the shrimp? I've noticed the TDS goes up every day by about 5 ppm. It's only a nano tank of around 15 litres. Thanks in advance, Sonny

That is a small tank so I would guess the tds rise may be down to evaporation, you could just keep a 1L bottle of RO water (TDS 000) next to the tank and do the top up with that which should keep the tds more level as it will dilute it. Evaporation is purely water and everything else (tds) remains in the tank! The breeding may be down to the tank just being fully stocked (though it is also likely the parameters are an issue) as any environment can only sustain so much/many creatures, how many shrimp do you think you have in this 15L tank? The best parameters for neocaridina are, PH 6.5-7.5, TDS 150-250, GH 6-8, KH 1-4. Your parameters seem a bit weird so I am guessing you aren't using RO water with shrimp remineraliser? Or you have something raising your KH as 9 is crazy high??? Maybe recheck that one! If you do reset the tank as per JayC you will need to do a long drip acclimate before putting the shrimp back in to the tank as the water parameters should be so different from the water they are currently in! It may be a good idea to to clean and start again at this point but bear in mind doing such may mean you will lose some shrimp due to the extreme parameter difference. I hope you weren't too affected by the recent storm!