The Puffer Forum

I miss the female dwarf puffers the male was a **** though.

Pufferpunk wrote:For more attractive coloring, I'd get 1 daylight & 1 actinic bulb, otherwise it'll be too yellow.

Not totally sure what actinic means and Google isn't being kind to me. Maybe I'm just running a little slow. What does that mean for me in the light bulb aisle?

suvattii2012 wrote:I miss the female dwarf puffers the male was a **** though.

I'm hoping for 1 male and 4 females, but I'm not sure how to go about doing that! Wondering if I should get 10 total to put in my tank, let them grow a bit, let the males get their eye wrinkles and watch their personalities. See who gets along with whom and so on and then rehome the extra males and aggressive puffs.

Something doesn't sit right with me there, though. I feel like it would be abandoning them! Has anyone else had that problem?

Also, in the way of bulbs, I took a quick, shaky picture with my cellphone at Walmart. If it's too bad to make out, the box says that these are 26 watt "cool" daylight bulbs. Is this what I'm after? Since they come in a pack of two, I figure I'll just use both of them until I get my DPs this spring/summer. Then I can get another bulb that PP recommends so that everyone's color is nice?

Sorry for all of the question marks. I just want everything to be the best that I can manage right now.

Those are great bulbs. You may not find them to be yellow, all our eyes perceive colors slightly differently, I find those 6500K a crisp non-yellow white light.
Getting an actinic, which is a blue bulb, is going to be a personal color preference. I only have them on as supplementary lights on marine tanks.
All my planted tanks have the 6500K "cool daylight" bulbs.

Thank you! That's what I was hoping to hear, since it will of course save a little money by using the two bulbs from one package instead of getting another. I can always switch it around if I don't like the colors, eh?

I'll go back to the store tomorrow to snag that package!

Oh! And I finally finished overhauling the tank today!

Took absolutely everything out, because the hand-me-down tank had an undergravel filter and a startling amount of hideous gravel. Then I broke open my very first bag of pool filter sand and rinsed it a bunch of times before spreading it in the tank.

Can I just say that I LOVE this pool filter sand stuff? The texture is really attractive, it doesn't look very unnatural in the tank, it rinsed out VERY easily, and I was even able to vacuum it without siphoning out more than a teaspoon or so with the water!

Anyway. Then I tried my best to arrange my driftwood in an attractive manner and got to work planting all of the goodies that LGP sent me. I also put in a few clay pots on their sides for caves and plopped a few pretty pebbles to decorate the sand.

I'm really pleased, especially since this was my very first time "aquascaping"! I'm excited to see some plant growth soon so that it doesn't look so... freshly done. If that makes sense.

My AC70 will be at my doorstep by this time tomorrow, and I'm so excited! As soon as that puppy is up and running, the cycling will commence!

I like pool filter sand too, and Black Diamond for dark.
If you want to support plant growth, keep your bulbs >5000K, anything below doesn't work well, and tends to make the water look like urine.

Instead of foil, which wrinkles and diffuses, you can paint this inside a white gloss, or cut and fit 2 baking pans inside.

I'm getting a new hood this weekend that will accept two of the CFLs in the picture above. So basically I will have two of those bulbs over the tank. Those are 6500k each, not per pack, right? So that means that's good? Sorry, this lighting thing is so new to me.

And good advice on the reflecting methods! I'll can definitely do the paint. Is acrylic paint okay?

Those are exactly the type of bulbs I used.

Awesome! I know they'll be great, then! I'm picking them up today!

I don't yet have the cash for all of the supplements that you use, but I should be able to accumulate them slowly. With that in mind, is there any specific order of the Flourish line that I can acquire in? And perhaps some that won't work without the others? Like... such and such bottle first, such and such bottle second but it won't work without bottle three, so those need to be purchased together... I have no idea if that made any sense at all.

I do have a DIY CO2 bottle set up and ready to be inserted into my filter that is coming today!

So excited!

Go to a hydroponics store. You can buy fertilizers there and it is so much cheaper than the liquid ones.

I will look into that and make a few phone calls today, Flutter! Thank you for that suggestion. Never even crossed my mind!

I JUST realized that I have the tank set up in such a way that the filter can only go at the right end of the tank! The intake tube is on the left side of the filter itself.

Did I screw up? Do I need to reverse everything in the tank?