Sick GSP

Oh no! Sick fish?! Come here and see if someone can help!
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Read this before posting!!

Since this board has been up, we have found there are several questions that routinely get asked in order to help diagnose problems. If you can have that information to begin with in your post, we'll be able to help right away (if we can!) without having to wait for you to post the info we need.

1) Your water parameters - pH, Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrates and salinity (if appropriate). This is by far the most important information you can provide! Do not answer this with "Fine" "Perfect" "ok", that tells us nothing. We need hard numbers.

2) Tank size and a list of ALL inhabitants. Include algae eaters, plecos, everything. We need to know what you have and how big the tank is.

3) Feeding, water change schedule and a list of all products you are using or have added to the tank (examples: Cycle, Amquel, salt, etc)

4) What changes you've made in the tank in the last week or so. Sometimes its the little things that make all the difference.

5) How long the aquarium has been set up, and how did you cycle it? If you don't know what cycling is read this: Fishless Cycling Article and familiarize yourself with all the information. Yes. All of it.

We want to help, and providing this information will go a LONG way to getting a diagnosis and hopeful cure that much faster.

While you wait for assistance:
One of the easiest and best ways to help your fish feel better is clean water! If you are already on a regular water change schedule (50% weekly is recommended) a good step to making your fish more comfortable while waiting for diagnosis/suggestions is to do a large water change immediately. Feel free to repeat daily or as often as you can, clean water is always a good thing! Use of Amquel or Prime as a dechlor may help with any ammonia or nitrite issues, and is highly recommended.

Note - if you do not normally do large water changes, doing a sudden, large water change could shock your fish by suddenly changing their established water chemistry. Clean water is still your first goal, so in this case, do several smaller (10%) water changes over the next day or two before starting any large ones.
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jake_vdb
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Post by jake_vdb »

strike2 wrote:Yep thats it, I wont need this for freshwater, will I?
You should be able to buy the tank with or without the overflows, but if I were you, I would strongly consider a sump system (for freshwater, saltwater, or brackish)

You could probably build it yourself for less than the cost of a good cannister filter.

One of the things I really like about sumps is that you can relocate your heater(s) and protein skimmers (if it's a marine tank) so you have less unslightly things in/on your tank. If you want to invest the time and money you can have auto top-off and auto water changing also.
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strike2
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Post by strike2 »

Any good sites to check out sumpsand protein skimmers (just for further knowledge)?
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jake_vdb
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Post by jake_vdb »

strike2 wrote:Any good sites to check out sumpsand protein skimmers (just for further knowledge)?
Protein Skimmers are for marine tanks. I only mentioned them because if you're running a marine tank w/ sump you can put the protein skimmer in your sump rather than have the unslightly thing hanging in your tank.

Google is your friend. A quick search for DIY Sump gave me quite a few good links. So I'm sure you could keep yourself busy reading for hours.

A couple of quick thoughts:
1) A lot of the DIY articles people are making a custom sump tank out of acrylic. I would avoid this route (unless you need the sump to fit in a custom space). I would recommend building one in a tank (a standard 29gal or larger would probably be fine). Just figure out what partitions you need and have them cut them out of acrylic/glue them in place.

2) When building the sump you need to keep in mind that during a power outage the sump needs to be able to handle all the water that is going to drain out of the tank. Basically if your water level is about 1" above your sump drain height in the tank. If the power goes out that whole 1" of water is going to drain into your sump and not be displaced by the pump. On a standard 180g -- 72" x 24" x 1" = 1,728^3" or about 7.5 gallons would drain out. so your sump would need to hold at least an extra 7.5 gallons.

3) Make sure you get a good pump. Has to be able to support the gph you need at a head height of probably 4' or more.
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strike2
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Post by strike2 »

What is the general purpose of the sump?
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jake_vdb
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Post by jake_vdb »

strike2 wrote:What is the general purpose of the sump?
It's just a big filter. You can fit way more media that you could in even the largest cannister.
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strike2
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Post by strike2 »

interesting.
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jake_vdb
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Post by jake_vdb »

strike2 wrote:interesting.
Yeah the cool thing is that you can really customize them to be anything you want. You can have your sump be a wet/dry filter (by having a drip tray over bioballs). You can have a large section to actually keep live plants or fish in. You can use them to hide your heaters (like I mentioned before). With plumbing you can do auto top-offs and water changes...

Another nice thing with sumps is that your water level doesn't ever drop in your tank, it's always full. (the water level does drop in the sump, so you still need to replace water that has evaporated off, but your tank doesn't look partially empty after a week of not adding any water). When you do water changes, what a lot of people do is just shut the pump off, drain all the water out of the sump, then fill it up with the new water and turn the pump back on.

They are really great for adding meds, conditioners, etc. Cause you can add them to the sump and they will get mixed properly into the tank rather than have a heavy concentration in 1 area for a while.

If you don't want to build it yourself, you can get prebuilt sumps. They are obviously a lot more expensive..
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