The Puffer Forum

Do you think my 10g would be ready for some fish by next weekend??

How long has it been without fish or you putting any food in there? Do you have test kits for ammonia and nitrite?

Well I lost Mr. Puff yesterday morning. So it hasn't been running very long without a fishy, but I put some shrimp in it for now, with filter media from my 55g. I do have a liquid freshwater test kist as well. I will be doing a water test tomorrow some time. Anything else I should do?

I'm so sad to learn you lost your Mr Puff I know the feeling.

You should be okay as long as you keep an ammonia source and then do a big water change before adding any fish (literally 80-90%).

If it had sat a few days, the bacteria would have started to die, but you should have caught it in time.

I've found personally that bacterial die-off rate is MUCH faster with filter media that has very little poo/slow rotting waste than filter media saturated with fish poo and other solid/slow-breakdown waste. And that it's nearly impossible to tell them apart without a lot of experience. So, to be brief, really gross filter media with lots of crap in it will host a TON of beneficial bacteria for more than two days, but very clean looking media with only bacterial colonies will be depleted in 2 days or so at most of starvation.

Didn't you say you added all new substrate(sand) and rinsed all the plants and everything? So it's depending only on your filter - if you didn't change that to rid of copper remnants. I don't know if it would store in there either?? I would assume there would be copper in there as well if it was in the water...

Sounds like kind of a new tank if you changed everything.

I took the filter cartridge out and gave it a shake into some clean tank water in a bucket to remove the copper.

I'm not sure how long it would take with the clean tank though, do you have any other tanks you can steal filter media from to help it out? or substrate? (I didn't have nylons to hang it in so I tossed it in a mason jar, and sat it on its side on the bottom)

I would change out ALL the media & add new or media from another tank.

So should I take the filter media from my 55g tank filter? It's in a nylon baggy of sorts already, so if I take it should I jst set it inside my tank to help?

That will help to "seed" your new filter media but as soon as you remove it, you'll be removing the bacteria. It's gonna take 10-14 days for the bacteria to grow inside your new media. You could just squeeze the gunk from old media into the new filter media.

So I should just take my 55g filter media and give a good squeeze into my 10 filter then

I think that should do. You could wash it out into a small bucket & pour the brown water into your new filter material.

So I did my water test today and the are ammonia:0 nitrites:0 ans nitrates:0-1ish
The shrimp was in there for 5 days so far. I took it out and will just feed the tank flakes, the shrimp was starting to get rather nasty and gross to see, lol. Other than the stinky shrimp the tank is looking good.