The Puffer Forum

I don't know much about cycling a tank with ammonia or whether ammonia detergent is the correct stuff but there is a 'sticky' on this forum somewhere that explains how to do it from start to finish. The tanks i've cycled in the past have been cycled with fish food which is a much less scientific way of doing it.

As for providing a little extra 'hardness' you could do worse than adding a small mesh bag of coral rubble to one of your filter compartments, it will be useful for biological filtration as well as naturally upping your pH and hardness. Just don't add loads otherwise your pH may raise higher than you'd like. Coral rubble will dissolve at different rates up to approx. pH8.3 so it stands to reason that the more you have in your tank or filter the closer you will get to pH8.3. If you decide to go down this route it might be worth experimenting a bit now before you add fish.

Thanks for your reply, Iliveinazoo. Cycling is under control, I know how to do that, and ammonia detergent (as long as it is soap free) is fine, it just adds loads of ammonia as substrate for the ammonia oxidizing bacteria, so that they can multiply to very large numbers.

I will experiment a bit with pH and KH when the tank is almost or fully cycled. It is no use to do it now because pH drops very fast at this stage of cycling, the conditions are not "natural". I already have experimented a little bit with adding baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), though, to avoid pH crash during cycling. It works out quite nicely, so I'll try again once the tank is cycled to see how that works out. And maybe coral, as you suggest, is good idea to experiment with also. A source that gradually adds carbonates to the water sounds reasonable, to continuously counteract the production of acids in the tank, and not only at water change.

Now - how many dwarf puffers would you guys recommend for this 30 US gal (112 liter) tank, if I decide to keep DPs only? (The type of filter is mentioned in my first post. Overfiltration capacity should therefore be like circling the total water volume in the tank 6-7 times/hour)