Repashy: how much is too much?

[Marcia]

Hi everyone. I’ve got a 90L planted tank with Oase Biomaster 250. The alga-eater inhabitants are 1 BN longfin pleco (fully grown with respectable belly), 5 otocinclus, 5 red cherry shrimps. When I add a 1cm cube of Repashy Soilent Green for their dinner they all love it and there’s nothing left in the morning. Can I feed them Repashy everyday or would that be too much? Thanks.

 

[Onoma1]

HI Marcia, if your fish and shrimp are healthy and the food is fully consumed then I would continue as you are. Perhaps give your fish the odd day off and the occasional fasting period...in a decent sized planed tank they will find additional food sources which will help encourage more natural behavior. I use floating plants as a bit of an additional buffer. They help me both monitor the quality of the water using the duckweed index and suck up lots of nutrients if I overfeed. I use emergent plants for the same reason in the knowledge that the plants provide more stability as marginal amounts of overfeeding produces more nutrition which leeds to more plant growth which uses more nutrients...

We all take different approaches...this is just my personal take!

 

[Marcia]

Hi @Onoma1 thank you for your reply and advices. I’ve been feeding them Repashy twice a week now and they have once a week fasting day. In the tank at the moment there are plenty of frogbit, Amazon sword, cryptos, anubias, rotala, sessiflora and I recently added more bulbs. There are lots of wood for the pleco too and few botanicals scattered around. So hopefully there’s plenty for them to forage; like you said it’s nice for them to have more of a natural behaviour.

NEW ISSUE: few weeks ago when I was feeding Repashy nearly daily we noticed the filter flow got extremely slow. We took the Oase Biomaster pre-filter out and we were surprised to see that the blue sponges had shrunk and were super hard! I had to soft them with hot water to be able to clean them. In three years with this tank and filter we’ve never seen anything like this! We put new sponges in and I stopped with Repashy. Since then the filter has been working fine. Then I slowly started to give Repashy to them again twice a week. Yesterday the sponges were kind of slimy. I’m wondering if all that’s been caused by the gelatine in Repashy? Has anyone had this problem before? The only thing I can think of would be the Repashy gelatine clogging the sponges. Could have been coincidental? We do weekly water change 30-40%with Prime, use Dennerle fertiliser, nothing else. We vacuum the aqua soil at least once a week, clean the pre filter every week and wash the hoses once a month. We can’t think about a reason that clogged the pre filter so badly? Any input would be greatly appreciated, thanks again.

 

[Onoma1]

I haven't noticed an issues with my filter related to use of Repashy, however, I don't use Oase filters! If you are seeing a correlation between use of Repashy and hard filter materials this doesn't mean it's a causal relationship. I would see if any other factor had changed. My experience of using Repashy is that all of it is consumed without gelatin or any other ingredient remaining. Everyone's tanks are, however, different and even if it seems improbable it doesn't mean that it's impossible that Repashy is the problematic factor.

 

[Marcia]

Hi Onoma1 yeah it does seems unlikely that the Repashy cause the filter issues. I really hope it's not related because I want to carry on feeding them Repashy. Maybe it was a combination of other factors, like you said. When we had the filter sponges incident the hoses were very dirty with hairy algae even though there was none in thank. Maybe it was clogging the sponges slowly and we didn't realised...

 

[Bradders]

I made up some gel food and used that for a month—definitely no issues with the Oase filter as a result.

When we had the filter sponges incident the hoses were very dirty with hairy algae even though there was none in thank.

After this weekend, and seeing the HUGE amount of black gunk in both the inlet and outlet hoses, this could indeed be a contributory issue.