20 Gallon tank wish list

I decided to do everyone a favor and put together a Amazon.com wish list that would have everything (or as much as possible) of everything that you would need to setup your own 20 gallon freshwater aquarium. The list includes everything except decorations and the actual fish.

You can view the wish list here. Let me know what you all think.

Fishkeeping: Day 3

Right before the Larrimore's rolled out, I grabbed the latest numbers on the tank.

pH = 7.0 (Woot!)
Ammonia = 1.0 mg/l
Nitrate = 5.0 mg/l

I was happy about the pH finally leveling out, but the nitrates have me worried. I knew the gravel was still dirty when I put it in the tank even though I attempted to clean it, but I thought that the filter would fix everything.

After doing some research, I think I may have uncovered the problem. In a fish tank, there are 3 types of filters; Mechanical, chemical and biological. Mechanical filters pull in water and pass it through a mesh that keeps dirt and particles from flowing back into the tank. Chemical filters are a medium like charcoal removing chemicals like ammonia. Biological filters are live bacteria that take the nitrogen (nitrates and nitrites) and fish waste and produce oxygen.

The reason why I still have nitrates in the tank is because I don't have a biological filter. The problem is that a biological filter is grown not made. Fish naturally have the bacteria in them and when they excrete waste, they also excrete the bacteria. The bacteria gather in the mechanical filter and grow.

This means that the only way to lower the nitrates is to clean the gravel and replace the water and start over, unless I want to take a chance with the new fish.

I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do yet, but luckily I have some time to think about it.

What do you think?

You Goofed me Google! Export with caution!

For anyone using Google Blogger:

Please be extremely careful with your posts and blogs. I recently transferred posts from one blog to another and found out that the export feature of Google Blogger was not all that it was cracked up to be, if you use jump breaks.

Apparently, Blogger exports your posts in Atom format, which seems harmless enough, except when you use jump breaks. It will cut the post off at the jump break and then put in a link to the old blog post. Combine that with cleaning up posts at the old blog and you will loose precious posts. Currently, half of my posts are now gone. Months of blogging are now nothing more than short posts that I will never be able to recreate.

If you want to export/import your Google Blog, be sure to go to "Feed Setting" under the Settings tag, and set "Allow Blog Feeds" to "Full" before you export. This should allow your blog feeds to be exported in full.