I’ve got a total of 7 in there. They’re much more well behaved now they’re in a larger tank, they still have disputes but the damage they inflict on each other is no where near as bad as before.
It was something I thought about however this is far from a biotope. There are fish from all over South America in here. At one point it was going to be an Orinoco biotope but I already had quite a few fish from Peru.
Nothing is very exact. I aim roughly for a tds of around 60/70 when remineralising my RO water with equilibrium. I dose the tank with roughly a half to a third of ei levels. But it varies, I noticed my tds had started to creep up to nearly 200 recently so I undertook water changes with almost pure RO and reduced my dosing slightly. I try to keep my tds around the 120 mark now in the tank. The fish would probably prefer it lower but it’s a happy medium where the plants grow well and some of the fish still breed. Much lower and my crypts start dropping leaves and struggle to grow.
Thanks. You're running with 0 kh then I assume? Or are you adding any carbonates via fert dosing?
It should be as I’m not adding anything that should raise my Kh. Everything seems to be growing pretty well now, I had issues in the beginning where I wasn’t supplying enough nutrients with my dosing but now I’ve switched to half EI everything seems to be good. If the TDS gets too high I just cut back on the ferts.
Can you provide more details on your water condition; i know you have several species that strongly prefer soft acidic water so where I'm confused is that you can have high tds but still meet the requirements for those fishes. My tap is 120 tds gh 7 kh 3 which is too hard for some of the species you have and the steady state tds in the tanks run around 140. I suspect I could go as low as 80 without harming the plants but i also suspect i have higher gh/kh than you have which would suggest your tds is composed of plant loving nutrients... but perhaps i misunderstand what is happening.
I'm not sure how one can answer this question since I would think it depends on what solids are the basis for the tds. Also I might be mistaken but tds meters themselves are a bit misleading because they are measuring conductivity and it isn't clear to me that all conductivity is created equal.
That’s correct, as far as I know I shouldn’t have any Kh which is what these fish wouldn’t like. They’d probably still do ok but there wouldn’t be breeding and colouration may not be as strong on say the nannostomus mortenthaleri for example.
Do you know if there is a relationship between gh and tds. I.e, could you have modest gh while having 0 kh ? I realize 0 kh is required to make the tank acidic but are the apistogramma sensitive to hardness or is it sufficient to just have low ph ? Mostly i'm asking this as I intend to setup a 'low ph' tank next year and I had presume gh had to be around 1 or 2 but maybe i can have a higher gh and all will work well.
Bad tds meter? I have 3 but all 3 seem to be in a similar range of 115-140.
