The Puffer Forum

That makes sense (I still don't know how powerheads work but I'll figure it out when the time comes). I remember someone saying that there was such a low amount of salt involved, I didn't really need a powerhead. Well, whatever. I would have probably gotten one anyways.

Soooo...what exactly does a powerhead do? I don't know, does it make a current, does it transfer salt, does it transfer water, what?
Can't I just pour the bucket into my tank?

a powerhead makes water current yes, and the reason you need it and an extra heater is for making brackish water. When you make brackish water you have to let it mix for 24 hours for it to be thoroughly mixed and not just partially, so it's not thrown in the tank any kind of way. If it's not mixed the salt particles can burn your fish.

Like seven said we need to know if you can cycle a tank at slightly brackish or it has to be fresh before we can give EXACT steps on how to set the tank up, however this is a basic idea.

You set the tank up, obviously. Then you rinse the sand before adding it. As seven said you can stick it in a bucket outside and stick the hose in the bottom and let the water flow over until it's clear, or you can do it in the house by putting some sand in a large bowl and adding water and mixing it around and rinsing it until it's clear. Either way make sure it's as clear as you can get it. Then add the sand to the tank, which at this point will have no water. Now, get something like a small plastic tarp, or a plate to set on the sand so when you pour the water it doesn't blow it everywhere and cause a bigger mess. Now fill your jugs or whatever you plan to the fill the tank with, with water, and add Prime water conditioner, http://www.google.com/products/catalog? ... CDUQ8gIwAg (looks like that), which makes the water safe for fish. After you fill the tank completely with water, add your heater and filter, and turn them on. Now rinse all your decor and fake plants really really well, don't use any soap or chemicals though, then add them to the tank (You could technically do this before adding the water if you'd like they just may not stay where you want them). Now, at this point you will want to cycle your tank before you get your fish of course, here's the article on that: library/water-filtration/fishless-cycling/ Now you're going to need a liquid test kit during all of this to measure your levels and see when it's technically cycled. (Now if you can cycle your tank at slightly brackish these steps will be slightly different of course.)

This is the article on mixing brackish water, very handy: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=19348

For step 9, I replace the water in the tank, right?
But what about the mixed water? That water hasn't been cycled.

It's likely going to be fresh. If it helps to mention, we have a water softener. Will that affect anything negatively?

I'm still just on my phone, but the water itself doesn't cycle. This is where the article, aquarium microbes will help. You really must understand the nitrogen cycle before hand. I'll try to get on something with an actual keyboard later so I 8am answer more thoroughly.
PP meant to say transfer the water to the tank, not salt.

Ok, I'm on my PC, which is old, on wireless that sucks, with a card that sucks too, so let's hope my intrawebz can stay connected long enough for me to send this.

Preface: A lot of these questions would best be answered by the chemist here, but I'll try to do the best I can to explain things, as I have come to understand them, but I would advise for you to wait for verification as I am not the expert.

A powerhead is like previously stated, not necessary in your tank, but it is for mixing your brackish water. A powerhead is basically a circulation pump, it has an output and and input nozzle, an impeller, and it draws water in the input and shoots it out the output. Make sure the powerhead you buy doesn't have some funky looking output nozzle so you can fit the plastic tubing over it. You will put the water and Prime in the bucket, and the estimated amount of salt to get your salinity to 1.003. Until you know for sure how much of your salt mix is required to get the amount of water you are mixing to that SG, specific gravity, go on the low side of any suggestion. The saltyzoo link I gave you earlier will be a lot of help when figuring out your salt levels, and your return water salt levels. Add the powerhead and let it mix the salt a minimum of several hours, best if left overnight. This may seem excessive, but you want to make sure you don't add undissolved minerals into the tank as this can be very harmful to your puffer.
Here is the powerhead I use for mixing and returning water to the tank: http://www.thatpetplace.com/pet/prod/253894/product.web Mine is a much older model, so I'm not sure if that flat deflector on the output nozzle comes off of the new one, but mine doesn't have that, it's just a tube. Any powerhead/pump should work as long as it doesn't have a goofy output that won't allow tubing to slide over it.

Ok, the clear plastic tubing is something you get from Lowes or Home Depot because you will get robbed if you buy it from anything aquarium related. I recommend just bringing the powerhead in so you can test to see if the tubing will fit over the output nozzle. Here is a link to an example of the tubing, it should be in the plumbing section or spools, it's apparently called PVC tubing: http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R ... ogId=10053

Yes, you can add the water to your tank with a bucket, but it is a PITA, and I prefer not lifting stuff over and over again, and I really like the steady even stream of water not disturbing my aquariums and inhabitants as much as a galloosh of bucketed water would.

You know that plastic that is used for presentation folders? It's transparent or translucent, kind of rigid, but mostly pliable, You can use a few of those to cover your substrate so the water will deflect and not stir it up. If you do this right, and you have rinsed it well, you could possible not have cloudy water for a couple days, but you still may. You can use a large plate as well, but I prefer the plastic because I can cover more ground.

A water softener? This is a question I can't answer, RTR can help you best here. But I can ask a few questions that will helpfully aid him in answering you. I am assuming that you have a water softener because your water is very hard, is the softener something you can disconnect or bypass temporarily? What is the brand/type of water softener? This is a great thing to have asked because the KH of your water is actually important in regards to cycling and how wonderful of you to think to check your water source ahead of time. (As I didn't and had a lot of problems)
You can get these tests so you can test your water for these parameters, general hardness and carbonate hardness.
http://www.bigalsonline.com/Fish_Water- ... tc=default
RTR may ask for these numbers. It would be great if you could bypass the softener, but I don't know if you can. Then if you are on city water you can just call them up to get those numbers. Is this absolutely necessary? Maybe not, but because I had an issue with my tap water that was related to the KH, and you brought up the softener, it very well may be quite important. RTR will be able to help you more here.

Something I just thought of, can you call or email the place you are ordering from and ask them what SG the puffers are in currently? As far as cycling the water as fresh, again please wait for RTR to answer on this, because he did mention something about low brackish not having an effect on the cycle time. Being able to skip the slowly raising the SG by .02 a week would probably be great.

As far as the "water being cycled", it's not actually the water that gets cycled. Again I highly suggest that you read the articles on the nitrogen cycle and aquarium microbes, but I will give you a shortened explanation for now.
The aquarium inhabitants will excrete ammonia as their waste product into the water column continuously, mostly from their gills, some from their poo. Ammonia is toxic to them, so the quick build up of this can kill them. In comes the first bacteria group that will consume the ammonia and convert it to nitrite. Nitrite however is still toxic and the quick build up of that can kill them. In comes bacteria group 2 that will consume the nitrite and covert it to nitrate. These groups of beneficial bacteria cling to surfaces, and are not present in the water column in any significant amount. They will be on your filter media, substrate, plants, any surface really.
Nitrate is much less harmful and can be present in the aquarium in small numbers without hurting the fish. Since puffers are scaleless, even the nitrates will have to be a less that with some fish. I like to keep mine below 5ppm, but below 20ppm is the max recommendation. There are several ways that nitrate can be removed from the aquarium, and that depends on the variables of the set up, but for this example I'll keep it relevant to your set up. 50% weekly water changes are going to help greatly with this, and should be plenty enough if you stock your tank moderately to lightly. The less fish the safer they will be from poisoning themselves in their own waste. And because your tank is low brackish, there are some plants that you can plant, water sprite being one, and it's one of my favorite plants. Plants need nitrate to grow, so adding plants will help keep this number down. I am not sure if you want to deal with plants or not, but I will say water sprite grows like a weed so it's not a difficult plant at all, and I find it to be quite beautiful.

The articles in the library explain how to cycle a tank, as you will need to complete this before you order your puffer so he doesn't die on you. So as the tank cycles, ammonia will rise first, then nitrite, then as the nitrate starts to rise, the ammonia should start to lower, then the nitrite. A cycled tank will have ammonia, nitrite readings of 0, but have some reading of nitrate. There are exceptions to the nitrate, it can also be 0 in a cycled tank, (Heavily planted, generous water changes, enough liverock in a marine tank, etc), but this is not likely in an initial set up, and doesn't exactly apply to your prospective set up. This is where the testing comes in, as you will be testing these parameters during your cycle.

Why you will need the saltyzoo calculators for help:
Water will evaporate from the tank, but the salt will remain. So as the tank evaporates, the water SG will raise. You cannot just add the same SG to the tank each week with water changes for this reason, as your SG will just keep getting higher. I personally recommend aiming for an SG of 1.003. I suggest this because water from 1.000 to 1.005, as I understand it, has the same, or at least most of the same types of beneficial bacteria, but above that, they change over. This change over is enough to possibly create instability in your beneficial bacteria numbers, and may result in your waste products not being completely converted. If you shoot for a 1.003 SG, that gives you a little wiggle room between that 1.003 - 1.005 range if evaporation raises it slightly, or if the water change maybe wasn't exact, something to that effect.
The saltyzoo calculators will help you determine how to correct any changes in your salinity during water changes and due to evaporation.

Okay, I'm late to the party, and cannot answer all the questions at once - it would be a book. I do have a number of articles in the Library here and I suggest you read at least my "considerations in fishless cyling" article in addition to the basic fishless cycling article.

Basic things: Mixing BW or SW is done separately from the tank itself. I never under any circumstances do mixing in any vessel with livestock - it is highly dangerous and high stressful for them. It coud be compared to cooking dinner fro guests with the guests in the pot with the dinner. You need a spare container. I mix in spare tanks - that way I always have water ready for use in an emergency. These are vented but largely covered tanks or plastic food-safe containers with a good pump or powerhead for mixing, and a heater. The same pump/powerhead may be used to move finished water to the tank as needed. That is far simpler and safer than mixing as needed -which takes 24-48 hours anyway. If I need something 2 days per week, I might as well always have it on hand - which saves a good bit of time and effort in water changes.

To me it makes no difference whether I cycle a tank FW and convert to light BW or build the light BW up slowly after cycling, but when you are starting from scratch I would probably suggest cycling FW and building the salinity over up over 2-3 weeks. The break point will be whether your fish will be in FW or BW when you get it. If it will be BW when received, you need to have BW ready. If it will be in FW, you can build salinity after the fish is present.

Fish can be drip-acclimated in hours. Bacteria are slower. We raise salt content slowly to give the bacteria time to adjust, and changes at about 0.002 points per week is conservative. At the 1.003 - 1.005 sg.we use for F-8s, that is 2 or 3 weeks. The bacteria are the same as those found in FW, but they do not adjust as rapidly as fish can.

Does all of that clarify or confuse worse?

On current: Current is critical to tanks. It moves water through our filters where undissolved particles are trapped in sponges or fiber mats for later removal, and where dissolved metabolites which are hazardous to fish are detoxific to less harnful forms by the nitrogen cycle bacteria. Current also moves O2 (taken up a\t the water surface) throughout the tank's volume, and with the same movement dumps excess CO2 to the air above the tank. Without current, the water will stagnate with decreasing O2 content with depth paralleled by increasing CO2. In short, the tank would be unhealthy. Current also provides exercise for the fish - think of it as treadmill at the gym - that current need not and in fact is be\st not being equal throughout the tank, but should have zones of higher current, such as long the front glass, for exercise, and areas or zones with less for feeding and napping.. Fish, like modern human\s, need more exercise than many tanks give them. F-8 are active vigorous fish - give them a chance to be lithe and muscular rather than fat and lethargic. Like sensible modern humans, they will live better and longer with activity. One of my quirks is that I always multi-filter my tanks. That allows me to tailor current flow quite well. All of my tanks have high water flow, but current ranges from river rapids to highly diffuse slow baclwaters. Contrary to what is commonly though, flow volume does not equal current. They can be quite different things, depending on how it is delivered.

HTH

More later...

I guarantee you--99% of the time, F8s are sold in FW.

figgy was part of the 1% sold in brackish then lol, but i think its cause they put whatever gsps and f8s and ceylons they have in the same tank... usually not more than 4 or 5 puffers at once.

Brackish made with marine salt? What was their SG at the shop?

RTR and seven, thanks so much. This definitely cleared a lot up.
As far as confusion, everything was easily understandable, but my brain turned off at-
"On current: Current is critical to tanks. It moves water through our filters where undissolved particles are trapped in sponges or fiber mats for later removal, and where dissolved metabolites which are hazardous to fish are detoxific to less harnful forms by the nitrogen cycle bacteria."
I'll look over it again, it's probably a lot more understandable than it looks.

Pufferpunk, I'm the 1% too. I called the place up and they said they keep their figure 8s in brackish (no wonder, they have a whole section labeled 'brackish'). Actually, a little too brackish. They are kept at 1.015
As far as the marine salt thing, I have no idea what you're talking about. I thought I was going to use marine salt. Isn't that what I'm supposed to use to make brackish?

Yes, you make brackish water with marine salt. Many stores make brackish with regular aquarium salt, which is why she's asking. Whether or not they have real brackish water or if they just tossed in a tbsp of aquarium salt.

Ok, I guess I have to call them up again.

Pufferpunk wrote:Brackish made with marine salt? What was their SG at the shop?

yeah, 1.007/8. they sell already mixed seawater which is what im using to make figgys water brackish, since its cheaper than mixing up my io then buying more.

The store uses marine salt, so that's covered. They really look like they know what they're doing.