The Puffer Forum

My name is Rowdy. A few years ago I had a green spotted puffer. I have to admit I had no idea what I was doing. I had him for a year and he died during a move into a new house. Afterwards we decided to not have an aquarium anymore. Well we recently recieved a biocube 29 for free from my fiance's uncle and decided to give it another go.

I have had the tank set up for about a month now and so far everything seems to be going well thus far. I have 2 figure 8 puffers, 2 black mollys, 2 electric tetras, and 2 plecos. I did make the water brackish, and all of the fish seem to be quite happy.

I decided to make an account here because I want to be able to properly care for my puffers. And this seems like probably the best place for puffer specific info. Anyhow, nice to be "met".

Those tetras & plecos definitely do not appreciate living in BW. Please find a proper home for them. What SG are you at in there?

Welcome! +1 to PP

thanks for the quick advice. I will get them out of the tank asap and I can give them to my mom, she just so happens to have a freshwater tank she was about to buy fish for. Sure she wouldn't mind some freebies.
I am actually unsure of the SG, I asked the people at the fish store where I bought the figure 8's how much salt I needed to add to my tank and they just told me 1 tbsp per every 5 gallons. I recently started doing research and realized that I need to get a refractometer and kits to test the water. I plan on getting all of that stuff this Tuesday.

Make sure you use marine salt.
library/puffers-in-focus/fig8/
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19348

+1, make sure you use MARINE salt, not AQUARIUM salt, no matter what your LFS tells you!
Get a refactometer, I got one on ebay for like $25, so they can be had for an affordable price.
1 tbsp per 5 gallon is not even CLOSE enough. I used about 7.5 tbsp per 5G to get a S.G. of 1.004. Im guessing this is why your other fish are fine, as you have so little salt that the water probably is still in the freshwater salinity range.

Okay, so after examining the box of salt I was sold with the fish, it would seem it is just aquarium salt. It is the API brand aquarium salt. I am feeling rather ticked off at the store I bought the fish and salt from right about now.

My mom came by and took the plecos and tetras today to put in her aquarium.

So now I am wondering what I need to do at this point, do I need to worry about the aquarium salt that I added to the tank? I am going to a pet store here in town tomorrow that specializes in fish and aquariums to buy a refractometer and a test kit, I figure while I am there I will go ahead and get actual marine salt for my tank as well. But do I need to do water changes to try and get rid of some of the aquarium salt I added before I begin adding marine salt? Or can I just go about beginning to convert the water to brackish with the marine salt I am going to buy?

Thanks for all of the help, I feel kind of moronic right now for not having done all of this research before I bought these fish.

I wouldn't worry about the Aq salt that's in there now--it's not very much. Just use the marine salt for now on. You read the 2 articles I linked you to?

Yes I did read the two links you posted. There was a lot of good info in there I appreciate your linking them. I do have 1 question after reading the link about mixing the brackish water, what is a power head? Lol.

Is a powerhead just any pump that I can submerge into the container to keep the water flowing while it mixes?

rowdy wrote:Is a powerhead just any pump that I can submerge into the container to keep the water flowing while it mixes?

Yes

Okay cool. Well I got all of the stuff I need now. So I am about to make up a batch of brackish water and do my waterchange soon. Hope it all goes well, of course I will refer again to that link as I am doing everything to make sure I don't mess up too bad. Thanks for all of the help.

Don't raise the SG more than .01-.02/week.

0.002 per week max raise in sg .Pp typo above

Okay. So I did my water change. After doing so and letting the new water mix in with the aquarium for about an hour, I used my refractometer and the SG was 1.002. I just now ran all of the other tests. High range pH is 7.8, ammonia is 0 ppm.

I am having a really hard time deciding which shade of purple my nitrite test is. But my first thought after a glance was 1.0ppm. Is there a trick to matching the purple shades to the color of the liquid?

Nitrate was really high, 160ppm. I am assuming there is something I can do to lower the levels of nitrite and nitrate? How bad is it for those two to be that high?