Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)
Hi,
John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.
I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.
With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.
I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.
If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.
I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.
I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.
Thank you
Darragh Sherwin
My African Cichlid Tank
- 2poc (2poc)
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- lampeye (lampeye)
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- Sean (Fr. Jack)
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That would be a ecumenical matter!!!
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- 2poc (2poc)
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It's actually hard to capture a shot with all of the fish, there are actually close to 40 fish in the tank (some juveniles) but there only looks to be about 20 in the pics.
Re: filteration - I run the Jewel internal filter as well as two Tetratec ex 1200 externals so I filter the proverbial bejaysus out of it

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- sheag35 (Seamus Gillespie)
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Fishkeeping the Only way to get wet and wild
currently 25 tanks, and breeding is the aim of everything i keep
location:Limerick
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- 2poc (2poc)
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stunning looking tank well done..the colours and by god do they look healthy..encore, hats off to you
Cheers sheag35

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- goldy (goldy .)
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- 2poc (2poc)
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tanks and fish look great. love the colours. Fr Jack has a point about this tank versus marine. Thats some amount of filter power but it seems to do the job. looks great
Thanks Goldy.
Yes, the great thing about most African Cichlids is that if you overfilter & make careful stocking choices you can really overstock without problems.
I appreciate marines but I much prefer a busy tank. Plus cichlids are bulletproof (once you don't actually fire bullets at them)

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- goldy (goldy .)
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- platty252 (Darren Dalton)
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- platty252 (Darren Dalton)
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@ Nessa. Your tap water shouldn't be a problem once you have some thing in the tank to buffer the water like lime stone, tuffa rock, coral sand or a substrate with 10% or more of Aragonit.
As far as i am aware Malawi's do fine in a ph>7.6 .
All the rock and substrate mentioned will disolve at a ph of 7.7 and lower. The more acidic the water the quicker they will disolve. So buffering the water shouldent be a problem. The use of additives with water changes should not be needed either and if they are it's only a bit of brad soda.
I have asked in the Cichlid section for someone to run a little experiment to see how quickly adding water of a lower ph than desired effects the water.
www.irishfishkeepers.com/cms/component/o...w/id,33759/catid,43/
Darren
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- goldy (goldy .)
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nessa
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- Darren (Darren)
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Great looking fish btw

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- serratus (Drew Latimer)
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