# 10 Gallon experience



## Rigio (Jul 23, 2013)

10 Gallon tank​Introduction:
My girlfriend and I had gone out on a whim and purchased a blue Veiltail Betta from a LFS along with a 0.5 Gallon aquarium with no heating and filtration, only to learn that the poor fish had fin rot. This inspired me to research how to cure him and through all my research I learned that pretty much everything the people from the fish store had told us was incorrect and that the aquarium we had was insufficient and not a good place for the poor Betta to live. I convinced my girl friend to purchase a 10 gallon aquarium for the Betta with a filter and heater, we tried numerous strategies to heal the Betta, but unfortunately his injuries were too far along and he passed away.

We then decided to redo the whole 10 gallon tank, I emptied the coated black gravel and plastic plants and replaced the substrate with Eco-complete, added an Anubias Nana, Anubias Barteri, amazon swords and corkscrew val. we bought 6 Cardinal tetras, a few red cherry shrimp, 3 otto's and Electric blue Ram. they all lived pretty well together until I had a bad outbreak of Ick. As I was only new to the hobby I had taken photos of the incident and requested help on a forum but when i had finally had a diagnosis it was already pretty bad. I had purchased and was dosing jungle's Ick guard but it didn't appear to help anything, everyone but the shrimp died. I left the tank for awhile, let the shrimp forage and fed them once and a while. I was very discouraged but still really interested in the aquarium hobby. I spent a lot of time on forums and big als online website.

Finally one day I had decided to move the aquarium from my girlfriend's in Burlington to Richmond Hill. This was a difficult task, I couldn't believe how much work it was to move a simple 10 gallon aquarium. upon bringing the tank to my house I decided to give it some TLC, I added some driftwood and some Hornwort. The Hornwort didn't do so well and melted away down to nothing creating a difficult mess to clean in my aquarium. My girlfriend and I then found an Electric blue balloon ram from Kijiji and a German blue ram from big als, after acclimatizing them both into the aquarium the lights went out and the EBR went to work eating all the red cherry shrimp. I then had an bad outbreak of algae and purchased a bunch of Amano shrimp, all of whom are great at avoiding any conflict. My girlfriend and I fell in-love with the rams and bought two more from big al's this time two females and we hoped they would pair and breed, but unfortunately all the rams recently died to a bacterial infection.

once again I'm left with an almost empty tank

I currently have 6 amano shrimp and 2 platies that I recently acquired from a member off the forum

Pictures:
1) original tank fresh from the LFS
2) added plants
3) added more plants/driftwood
4) Tank Today
5) Tank Today


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## Kimchi24 (Mar 22, 2013)

Quite the journey you've had with this tank, huh?  I feel your pain, we all go through tank disasters and it really blows. Nice job with the tank so far. Rams are pretty sensitive (which is why I never took a shot at them). Hopefully everything turns out great!


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## Rigio (Jul 23, 2013)

Kimchi24 said:


> Quite the journey you've had with this tank, huh?  I feel your pain, we all go through tank disasters and it really blows. Nice job with the tank so far. Rams are pretty sensitive (which is why I never took a shot at them). Hopefully everything turns out great!


Thanks, 
Well, I had done my research on then and I knew they were hard to take care of but I had the 4 of them living together for 5-6 months without any issues. I forgot to mention, I believe the bacteria infection to have bee brought upon by my own mistakes. I was fiddling with the cords and plugs, organising them and I thought in had plugged them all in. And to my knowledge they were working. One of my rams died then 3 days later another died in had checked my parameters, everything was normal, looked at my 2 dollar thermometer and it showed the temp as 81C and I didn't think anything of it. One day it was cold in my room and I noticed that my indicator light on the heater wasn't on and I clued in that my heater wasn't working, checked the plug and low and behold it was unplugged. I was so mad at myself

In had also recently purchased a 50 gallon Aquarium that big was going to set up high tech and heavily planted for the rams but they've all moved on now


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

Just have to keep at it. Think of every failure as a learning experience. I can say that I have learned a lot myself. Lots of failures.


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## Rigio (Jul 23, 2013)

pyrrolin said:


> Just have to keep at it. Think of every failure as a learning experience. I can say that I have learned a lot myself. Lots of failures.


Yeah it just sucks when you lose fish you get attached to. Btw when in first got the rams they always interacted with me, it would follow my finger and watch me on my computer then one day they just stopped and would always swim and hide when I came near


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## tom g (Jul 8, 2009)

*tank*

don't give up ....what ever u do we have all done mistakes and had disasters even the exp people sometimes stupid things happen .
do u have a test kit .You didn't mention it but are u using de clorinator in there I rec u use prime .rams are pretty fussy I have had good exp with them and bad .
just recently with my tank disaster no matter what I did I could not find a pair to keep every time I purchased a pair they would pass...so patience is a virtue here .keep at it and lets see what the 50 gal looks like 
cheers 
tom


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## Rigio (Jul 23, 2013)

tom g said:


> don't gh 't give up ....what ever u do we have all done mistakes and had disasters even the exp people sometimes stupid things happen .
> do u have a test kit .You didn't mention it but are u using de clorinator in there I rec u use prime .rams are pretty fussy I have had good exp with them and bad .
> just recently with my tank disaster no matter what I did I could not find a pair to keep every time I purchased a pair they would pass...so patience is a virtue here .keep at it and lets see what the 50 gal looks like
> cheers
> tom


Thanks for the encouragement,

I use I believe we use nutrafin aqua plus as the dechlorinator I've wanted to switch to back different brand but couldn't find enough information on which to switch to. Once this bottle is done I will switch, shouldn't be too much longer. I have quite a few test kits and the water parameters were:
PH 7.5
Nitrate:0
Nitrite0
Ammonia:0

Dont remember the kh or gh off hand

When you raised your rams did you use tap water or a mixture of tap/RO?


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## Rigio (Jul 23, 2013)

Yesterday when I got home from work I noticed all the Amano shrimp were swimming around like crazy and 3 of them had what looked like a wrestling match. After work today I was feeding the Platies I recently got for free and I noticed that the biggest of my amano shrimps is berried. :O


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## Rigio (Jul 23, 2013)

Here are some pics of her


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## 10G (Sep 15, 2013)

Nice 10 gallon, I like the floating plants. #lush...


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## Rigio (Jul 23, 2013)

10G said:


> Nice 10 gallon, I like the floating plants. #lush...


Mini water lettuce  got it for free, love it


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