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I tore down my planted tank and dirted it today, what's the over/under on adding the fish back?
(mander.xyz)
It's a 20 long. I have 10 white cloud minnows, a few celestial danios and three pygmy cories currently at summer camp in a bucket with a sponge filter. I am trying to decide if I should leave them there and replace a gallon a day or chuck them back in the tank and watch ammonia like a hawk. I have a RO filter so water changes are no problem but I just can't decide which approach is best.
And yes, I know this could have all been prevented with better planning. Let's just stipulate that that ship has sailed.
Heavily planted tanks are very forgiving. Give the plants a few days to suck up excess nutrients and the bacterial colony in the soil to recover a bit.
Do a quick test to make sure everything is okay and toss the fish in. 3-4 days tops..
That's the energy I need! I reused all the fluval substrate for the cap and also about five gallons of original tank water, I did everything I could to drag over a lot of bugs. I'm hopeful that this balances my carbon economy, I've been fighting hair algae and I eliminated everything but low carbon and I don't wanna go to CO2 injection because I'm so so lazy.
I would personally recommend picking up some amanos if you haven't already.
I spent loads of effort balancing my aquarium and it did eventually help some, but then adding amanos really reduced new growth of hair algae. I think they eat it when it is just starting so that it can't grow mature enough to become resistant/unpalatable to algae eaters.