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African Cichlids Anyone?

I still haven't set up my tank. I need a filter still. I have the sand and stand. Being out of work has been pressing on my finances so it's been on the back burner. I've been doing some shopping only when I see it on sale for a great price. Black friday soon. I have a bunch of stuff in my saved list to look at before I either go out or online....

Cad, what specific brand of filter do you use? size?

how many and what kind of filter is recommended for a 40 gallon tank?
 
@CaddmannQ thought you may be interested in this.....

Is this classified above my level? There is no reference to "this" there.
images
 
No silly. the entire topic is "this"...there was nothing in my post. You have fish. he has fish. i have fish.
and questions about em...
 
Hey Ripjack, thanks for pointing This Thread out. I want to read the whole thing right now but I'm not done setting up for Thanksgiving.

I will tell you the joke about invisible robot fish later.
 
I still haven't set up my tank. I need a filter still. I have the sand and stand. Being out of work has been pressing on my finances . . .

Cad, what specific brand of filter do you use? size?

how many and what kind of filter is recommended for a 40 gallon tank?

First off, I feel for you brother, being out of work at the holiday season. I had one or two years where I was jobless and I had to go pawn my stuff and sell work at art shows to have a nice Christmas for the family. You'll pull it together but of course it will be stressfull. That's americanism 101.

I am not very experienced with cichlids. I only know what I read in the funny papers. I've managed to kill off every angelfish I ever had, because I did not understand them well enough. They are not twice as sensitive as my other fish. They are ten times as sensitive.

Felix seems to be much more robust.

Other than undergravel filters, I only have used one real commercially made filter, which is an Aqueon hang-on canister.

I have the Aqueon 75 in that picture on the 55 gal tank, and I have an Aqueon 10 which is a miniature version of the same thing on my 16 gallon tank.

If you have a 40 gallon, you might get the Aqueon 50. Even the 75 would not be too much.

They work pretty well but they do make some noise as there is water falling. They're easy to clean, but I don't like the whole idea of hang on filters.

Structurally, they add stress to the most stressed part of the whole tank, which is the top edge of the long glass. Also I think it's overpriced for the filtering capacity although perhaps not considering the convenience, IF you have extra money to play with.

Right now all of my filters are do-it-yourself stuff made up out of various power heads, pool pumps, canisters and bottles, foam and filter floss. Some are more successful than others.

On the 30 gallon Oscar tank I am currently running an AquaClear 50 powerhead in reverse flow mode with a big input filter at the top of the tank and the discharge down to an undergravel filter.

This blows up all the Oscar poop up out of the gravel bed. (Cichlids make a big mess and they like clean water and live food. This means they are are a bit more work to take care of in general)

Then at the bottom there is a small pool pump in a canister filter made from a plastic box that it came in. Two kinds of foam and filter floss. This sucks up any low floating stuff and discharges up to agitate the surface. I buried it under lava rock so you can't see it.

Then I unsnap the powerhead from the Aqueon 75 and turned it upside down. I cut up a plastic bottle to make a skimmer and attached it to the input. I stuck in a couple plastic pot scrubbers and some floss and this catches up the floating stuff on the surface and blows clean water to the bottom of the tank, which is mostly where Felix and Morton live.

There are also two air stones in the tank.

What filters you choose depends a lot on the fish are that you intend to keep. Since Oscars are notoriously messy I used 3x as much filtration as the average person. I also put Morton, the big pleco, in there to police up the mess.

For little submersible pumps, you can get an excellent one at Harbor Freight for $8.99. It is as as powerful as the Aqueon 75 pump at a fraction of the price.

Skimmers and intank cartridge filters can all be made out of various plastic boxes & bottles.

Filter foam is an expensive deal but I found some big chunks designed to go in your rain gutters for 7 Bucks. It's like 10 PPI, and perfect for your coarse pre-filter. 30ppi I am buying at the pet store

If you have the place to run an external sump it is a neat thing to do because it gets everything out of your tank and all you need to build one is your old 10 gallon tank and some new silicone. A few bits of plastic or glass in a little time with the skill saw and we can build a sump better than anything you can buy for hundreds of dollars.

If you've never watched his videos, go look up UaruJoey on YouTube. He's also known as the do-it-yourself fishkeeper or the King of DIY. His homemade tanks are impressive.

He will show you how to build all kinds of neat stuff at a fraction of what you would pay at the fish store.

(Edited for several typos and grammatical errors.)
 
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Well I took the time this evening, after everyone went home from dinner, to read through this entire thread.

First I have to say that I am really impressed to see how many of you are fishkeepers. The tanks and fish all look very attractive.

Because the Air Force moved us around frequently, an aquarium was something that I could never have as a kid. Also when we were lucky we got to live in nice government housing, and when we weren't, we had landlords who took it very unkindly if you damaged their floors with water.

Anyhow over the years I had made friends with local kids who had aquariums and I was always very interested in having one, but I knew very little about it and I knew my dad would never go for the idea.

When I was out of college and living in my first apartment on my own without a pack of college roommates, I went out and bought my first 10 gallon aquarium.

After having one for a while I realized it I wasn't that interested in it and would rather spend time customizing my motorcycle. But I found that girls were interested in it, and it was easy to get them to come over to see my fish. That's kind of how I met my first wife.

When I met my current wife I had no fish. The aquarium had been given up in the course of several moves from houses & apartments to different cities following jobs.

I purchased a second aquarium, which was a 30 gallon, for her for Christmas and I have maintained it for her ever since. Or at least the aquarium stand, which I bought unfinished and we finished together.

That was sort of our first project as husband and wife.

Anyhow that first 30 gallon aquarium leaked after 12 years, and I bought a second one. After 15 years it was showing signs of weakness, and I bought my current 30 tall Aquarium a few weeks ago.

We also had a 10 gallon aquarium which was 28 years old and had never leaked but was old and scratched. I retired that one and bought the 16 gallon Aqueon bowfront.

In the process of setting up aquariums I decided that I wanted a hundred gallon aquarium. I built a stand that will accommodate about a 90-100 gallon aquarium, if it's custom built. The largest standard size aquarium that I believe I can put on it is 55 that I have now. I bought this as a complete kit for $165 +tax.

I eventually intend to move this aquarium to the sewing room, which doesn't get much sewing done in it. At that point I will order a larger custom-built aquarium to fit my stand.

I will post some new photographs of these aquariums as they currently are, with the description of the filter setups and my criticisms of each.

Right off I will say that I am doing things in the aquarium few people do anymore, if they are serious fishkeepers, because of the extra work involved. When you have a lot of rocks and gravel on the bottom of the tank it looks great but you have to keep them clean. The easiest tank to clean is a bare bottom tank, but it's not as much fun to look at, nor did the fish enjoy it as much. Sand is the next best alternative and if you have fish to help you keep it clean it can be a good deal.

The more stuff you put in a tank the more stuff you have to keep clean. A lot of what you have to keep it clean of is algae. Unless you have other real plants in your tank you need that algae to stabilize the nitrates. Unless you have live plants growing in your substrate it is a mistake to remove all the algae from your tank.

Unless you use an algae generator, which basically quarantines the algae, to a location of your choice, allowing it to do its work without being pervasive in the tank.

This is something I do not currently have but I intend to construct. In addition it will help keep a tank warm, so we will have slightly less load on the heater.
 
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wow...so much information. i love it. thanks cad. i'm looking around for a canister filter at the moment. i do have a 75 gal filter. (hanging filter)
i'm looking to fill the 40 with a few different varieties...
black molly, japanese trap door snail, shrimp and blue crayfish, and maybe some clams. i've steered away from the cichlids and now am leaning towards freshwater sharks. i have to find out if all of them together will be a good mixture.
i need to look into some real plants too. i'm tired of the fake crap.
 
Okay here are some pictures of the tanks currently.

The Aqueon bowfront 16:20171124_104106.jpg

It has an Aqueon 10 hang on filter and it has a 10 gal style undergravel filter run by air stones. The undergravel filter does not extend under the bow front. There's also a little air stone & nitrate pad filter inside the bubbling SpongeBob ornament.

This tank currently houses one male betta one common plecostomus 3 Emerald corydoras and 8 serpae tetras.

13 fish is a full biological load for a 16 gallon. This tank needs more filtration, but even so fish will die as they get larger and the tank will crowd. I need to take a few of these guys out and put them in the 55.

I want the undergravel filter to reverse flow which means I need a pump.

I improved the filtration of the Aqueon 10 by adding a little more filter floss inside and a nitrate pad. I also jacked it up about 5/8" which agitates the water a little more because it falls farther. It's still inadequate for this many fish. I would say three fish in a 10 gallon tank would be a good load for this filter alone. Because I have a big bed of gravel as a biological filter, that keeps it adequate as long as I vacuum the gravel frequently.

If I don't vacuum the gravel or change the water for 4 days I will have a big nitrate spike in this tank.

I plan to remove the hang on filter and convert the pump in it to a surface skimmer, as you will see I did later on the Aqueon 75 in the 30 tall.

I'm also planning to build a dual flow undergravel filter, which will not allow the gravel to pack. This should reduce my gravel vacuuming to once a week.
 
This is the custom-built 30 tall. Currently it only houses Felix the Oscar and Morton the Pleco. Those two are plenty of biological load on this tank however. They can poop like crazy

20171124_114302.jpg
A tall aquarium can tend to stagnate more easily. You need lots of vertical water flow. I am running a 200 gph undergravel, reversed, for the powerhead to filter near the surface and blow under the gravel. It is not yet a two-way system both pumping into, and sucking out of the gravel. The pump is at the top of the tank which is absolutely wrong. Pumps need to be at the bottom of the tank. That's on the pvc tube at the right hand of the tank.

At the upper left you see a bottle filter which is my skimmer. It is the powerhead and pickup tube from the Aqueon 75 hang on filter, inverted, and attached to a 1 liter bottle which I have cut down and punched. This skims the surface and blows straight down at the bottom of the tank, helping to prevent stagnation under the gravel. But it does not go under the undergravel filter. I put this in to replace two canister-type column filters.

The little nuclear reactor filter at the lower right is really a 30 PPI foam filter inside that glass canister. The circulating bits are cut from plastic straws and really do nothing more than look cute and let me know the filter is not clogged up. That filter is fed through the blue hose, from a 250 GPH fountain pump wrapped in 10 PPI filter foam with some black zip ties. It's kind of buried under some lava rock in the back and you don't see it.

In addition there's a little Harbor Freight 200 GPH fountain pump inside a plastic canister filter made from the box it came in. Is covered with chunks of lava rock and it's all black so you don't see it. It has a 10 PPI course filter 30 PPI fine filter and some filter floss captured by some fine white Scotch-Brite that prevents the floss from getting in my pump.

With all that pumping action, four pumps, the tank still clouds a little every time Felix eats or poops. I give him about 4 months in this tank before he's too big for it.

Here Felix chows down on a yummy mealworm. Regular earthworms are better for him. I think too many meal worms make him constipated.
20171123_213347_resized.jpg
I bought expensive silk plants for this tank but I got them on sale at Pet Extreme. I hope they don't Fade Out like the cheap Dollar Store variety.

I don't like plastic plants either Rip, but that's all I've ever had in my tanks until I bought these silks.
 
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By the way Walmart sells an excellent and inexpensive 2 Outlet air pump and I have three of them. There is one on each tank.

This is the 55 gallon Aqueon, and it currently houses Bob, the 6-inch silver dollar, Betta Alpha, baby Morton the small plecostomus, and 17 neon tetras.

20171124_102154_resized.jpg
I'll add more about the pump system later.
 
On the left upper side of the 55 gallon tank you can see a bottle filter, which is my big skimmer. This is attached by some jump PVC bits to a 325gph fountain pump. It discharges near the middle bottom, through a modified lawn sprinkler that I slotted with the circular saw, to make a diffuser.
20171124_102316_resized.jpg

On the right-hand side is the collection of canister filters. These are all made from $3 & $4 Discount Store items.
10707.jpeg

The leftmost one is just an AirStone powered canister filter stuffed with some filter foam and plastic pot scrubbers, and basically I am just trying to age this media and provide aeration for the tank.

The middle filter is also stuffed with plastic pot scrubbers a nitrate filter pad and some floss. Water is sucked through this by the undergravel pump, down through the clear hose and pumped back up through the rocks. That burried one is a 15 year old 200gph powerhead.

The rightmost canister has a bottle skimmer that sucks through the pump you see and blows the water through the lava rock and Scotch-Brite. This was a very small and extremely overpriced 10 gallon per hour powerhead, which I bought from my favorite local fish store. With tax it ended up costing over three times as much as the Harbor Freight pump.
 
Regarding Scotch-Brite use in filters:

Don't put the ones for your kitchen or bathroom in an aquarium as they contain bactericide
.

These 17" Quickie floor buffer pads work great though. $7 at Lowes, which less than the price of anything tiny at the big aquarium store.

They also come in white and I have been using the white ones and the green ones in my aquarium for year. I have not tried the black ones and red ones but I don't believe these contain any chemicals at all. Each one of my tanks has pieces of the white or green in it right now.15115605660721022071155.jpg

 
A couple of other things that occurred to me, one major and one minor.

Instead of buying filter floss for aquariums you can buy polyester fiberfill bats from a fabric store.

But I found some Chinese pillows that were 100% polyester including the ticking and the fiberfill for $2 at the dollar store. They come vacuum packed and don't look like much but when you puncture the plastic they fluff up a lot. You get about $10 worth of floss for two bucks plus you get a big cloth filter bag.

If you have a sewing machine you can make about 10 filter socks out of that pillowcase.

Just use stuff that is 100% polyester so it doesn't break down and rot in the tank.

That was the minor thing.

The major issue is for any of you rookie fishkeepers out there: don't do what I did!

I put aquarium sand and gravel in the little tank but the two larger tanks have lots of lava rock and some red desert sunset granite rock.

All the rock looks great, which is why I set it up that way, but you see I also know that these tanks are temporary setups and I would be changing the filter systems and aquascaping completely when I had more time to work on them. I also knew that in the meantime they would be a whole lot of work to maintain.

Generally speaking if you put a lot of rocks and gravel and sand in the bottom of your aquarium you're going to wind up eventually with a tank that has packets of evil bacteria and dung in the corners and nooks. And there are a lot of corners and nooks when you do this.

The easiest way to keep your fish healthy is to have a bare bottom in your tank with just a few ornaments and things for the fish to hide in when they get afraid. It takes about 10 times less cleaning of the tank that way and because of that you will actually do the cleaning and your fish will live happily.

Some fish do need sand or special plants where they can "nest", so like anything this advice doesn't apply 100% of the time.
 
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Now after a dozen posts, something to get back to the original topic.

Aside from the Oscar I would really like to raise angelfish and also I would like to have some shell dwelling cichlids. For this you need a Sandy Bottom tank and some seashells for them to live in.

Other than angel fish, Oscars, and the Shell dwellers, I know absolutely nothing about cichlids. Also I'm not trying to recreate any particular natural situation. This is more of a science experiment in my case.

Anyhow are there other cichlids with strange or interesting habits that I've never heard of? This is something I will look into.
 
Wow....I have to get one of those hf pumps.
Undergravel filter is a good idea I hadn't thougbt of using.
I'll make a new tank base. The one I have it setting on is an old cabinet, pretty much office paper storage.

Here's my little 10g tank and my 2 mollies, frick n frack.
Frick has the long tail...

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I've never seen any like that. They look like koi fish.

HF has a pump that is twice as big and cost twice as much money, but it will be much better in a 40 gallon aquarium, and in fact if you're going to have messy fish I would use two of them. I'm running 3 in my 55 and it's not enough for me, but one of them is wimpy.

That being said, I have been shopping on eBay and the prices of Chinese aquarium stuff are rock bottom right now. With the climb of the Chinese middle class and the lack of room to own pets like dogs and cats, pet fish are becoming a big deal over there.

If you build a stand which will not just house the sump but actually be the sump, it could be big enough to hold another 40 gallons of water, or at least some substantial portion of what the tank contains.

As far as water quality goes, having 80 gallons of water to run a 40 gallon tank this is going to cut your water changes in half. You will change twice as much water each time but do it half as often.

Having an external sump means less Invasion on the fish by you and by the noise and presence of the equipment. It also means you can run everything with one really big pump.

Undergravel filters have not been popular since the 1990s, and I think this has to do with the fact of money versus labor.

An Undergravel filter does not need replaceable media. You just have to vacuum the gravel every now and then. It lasts forever.

But you can't forget to do it so there is labor involved, and it will take longer than just changing the floss or foam in a sump or canister.

UaruJoey shows you how to build a neat canister filter out of a 5 gallon bucket and a special heavy duty lid, that will have more capacity to filter then a $500 German model.

Unfortunately they are too fat to fit in my cabinet so I'm not going to do that. In fact I'm thinking more of going the uniquarium route, with the divider wall that hides all the equipment in the back of the aquarium.

This will be a little harder to clean, but you never have the possibility of a hose leaking, or the gasket on the canister leaking, and I can still have some decorative filters that are mostly for looks.
 
It just occurs to me that every cichlid I ever owned has been American. I have never owned an African cichlid.

I have been considering setting up a tank for African shell-dwelling cichlids. But they are tiny and only occupy the bottom, and each family of them requires a bit of floor space.

That leaves a lot of open tank above for top fish, so I'd have to figure out what to put in there. I've never given any thought to having an American tank or a Tanganyika tank or Mbuna tank.
 
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