(‼️Short version at end cause I’m a yapper! 🦭)
Hi! I posted here a while back when I redid this tank for a teacher… which also happened to be basically my first tank with a decent amount of plants and hardscape.
She originally had a 20 gallon, which ended up leaking immediately after I asked if I could redo it lmao. She only got a 10 gallon after that, and so I filled it up and planted it etc as I waited for her to get another, larger tank.
She never got a larger tank. It’s kind of hard to see in the picture, but there’s a pretty large amount of guppies (imo) in there that are constantly breeding (ofc). She does no maintenance on the tank, and lets students (probably over)feed it daily.
I am not able to do water changes frequently enough to keep the nitrates low, at the start I was able to, but things have changed. And I feel like that and the possible overfeeding is leading to algae constantly needing to be cleaned off the glass and the tank always looking kind of gunky.
I know things like floaters and maybe some pothos would help, I just need to buy some… and I keep forgetting 🤷♀️.
Besides floaters and such, what else may help? I believe I had set the light to be on for 6 hrs or less, don’t quite remember, but it’s already on a fairly low intensity and I feel like the tank looks kind of dark (at least darker than I’d like) in person.
Also, I feel dumb for some of the plant choices. My main thing is I put two amazon swords in there… and I didn’t know much about them at the time. I think they’re both doing fine, a couple yellow leaves here and there, but I know at least the smaller, more visible one on the right is getting new leaves. I just feel like they weren’t a great option for this tank, aesthetically and health wise or whatever??? Should I pull them out and put a different plant in there, or leave them be? Maybe vallis, or something? Or should I just try to fill more space with the elodea and not tear stuff out..?? Idk
Also the back pane of glass is super annoying to try and scrape with the swords and wood, would putting on a black background hide the algae issues there so I can avoid scraping the back, and would it look alright?
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Basically: 10 gal with a fairly large amount of guppies imo, I can’t keep up with nitrates (any recs other than floaters and stuff like pothos?), there’s algae issues (not sure if it’s from the light(don’t think so), overfeeding, too many fish, etc), I’m not sure if the plants chosen (mainly the Amazon swords) should still stay or if I should replace them, don’t know if I should bother with putting on a background… I think that’s about it? Also the teacher who owns this tank has done nothing for it, and probably will continue to not do anything. So any way I can make maintenance demands lower is helpful.
This is kind of a lot, but any sort of feedback would be super appreciated! Even if it’s just a mean comment on how it looks lmfao! 😭😭
Posted by diseasedv