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
Fish Room (one more try)
30 tanks specialise in african cichlids, angelfish and various catfish
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And if you have 7.5 meters long room, a small swiming pool is a must.
I'd prefer to have one large 3- 4 m tank, than few small ones.
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room is coming along nicely, some tanks have even come and gone since I last posted!
I've one "softwater" tank
with bolivian Rams, Corys, whiptails, Loreto tetras, & various others. Some 4 year Glowlights were thrown in as well and with a 300l tank of their own for a while, they actually grew! I didn't think it was possible
A Tang Tank
6 neolamprologus brichardi, 6 lamprologus ocellatus blue, 6 wild synodontis petricola
photos are iphone - I'll dig out the camera this evening . . .
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The water butt now gets filled nearly every day. I've a sump pump in it with enough hose to reach every tank in the house, so no more carrying buckets anywhere.
I'm also going to put some of the remote switches on these - so I can turn on and off the pumps while I'm doing something else (a great suggestion from Darren D.)
I also got a wheelie bin with a sump pump. All water changes go into the bin from the tank, then later pumped out through the window along a 50m hose, to a small field out the back.
I run air through the waterbutt 24/7 - in addition to aeration & running warm air through the water & helping to heat it, it causes iron (& presumably other metals) in the water to effectively rust & fall out of solution - so they're reduced in the water when it goes into the tanks. That seems to have solved some algae / cyanobacteria problems.
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I'll use some of these as dithers in some of the small CA tanks I'm putting together.
Plants are all spares from other tanks, so not a dream aquascape but hopefully will fill in.
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It was always manky and the filter needed constant attention. I don't know why it never dawned on me, but the Oliver Knott substrate I was using was slowly turning into fine soil, and the firemouths were digging it up and spreading it everywhere - which was killing the plants and wrecking the tank. The whole tank was covered in a fine film of dirt all the time - but I thought it was something to do with the wood - so I kept taking it out & cleaning it.
In the end - I drained all the substrate out during water changes:
That looks fairly drastic, but this is it now - (no fish lost during the changeover):
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btw, I can't be the only one laughing at the idea that you have an electrically powered butt!
"The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life; your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you.They're freeing your soul."
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I though long and hard before using that word - but one edged to be really sure which pump I'm turning on!
You'll also notice I avoided using the term "butt pump"
if you'd done that, you'd just have had to leave the forum, and possibly fishkeeping, altogether. there'd have been no coming back from that 
"The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life; your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you.They're freeing your soul."
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(now to wreck it by adding more stuff . . . . . )
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"The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life; your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you.They're freeing your soul."
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.Anthony
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There's 7 tanks up and running in there - mostly 180l - 350l, one of about 70l. I've also got 3 more in other rooms.
Sitting room has Thorichthys ellioti breeding pair, some wild guppies as dithers, group of wild montezuma swordtails.
Eliioti with one of the pits they put the wrigglers in
Other room has a 240l of randoms (barbs, lone cichlids, loaches..)
plus a 300l with sump Malawi tank - yellow labs, acei, Red hongi Sweden and breeding group of afra Jalo Reef.
Fish room has :
70l with Yellow splitfins (ameca splendens)
180 l Lake kutubu rainbowfish
300l amazon (cardinals, L205s, serpaes, clown loaches, F1 Bolivian Rams etc.)
200l growing on wild type guppies
300l tang tank - cyprichromis jumbo kitumba are holding - also ocellatus "blue", neolamprologus brichardi, paracyprichromis nigripinnis.
200l breeding pair cutters cichlids, 10 praecox rainbowfish
300l Thorichthys aureus & 10 parkinsons rainbows
I'll stick up at least a phone pic of each tomorrow!
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also added - this new rack - to house about a dozen small breeding tanks.
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