Overall my experience with saltwater has been hell. Heres a brief summary of what has happend etc and then some questions.
I had great success with freshwater. I had a 11" pleco and 10" oscar that were doing great which I had for over a year. I had to make a big move for college which they didnt make. Once getting here I had some extra money and decided to go with saltwater after seeing it was a bit cheaper than I had thought.
The tank is a 55g with about 7lbs of live rock, a fluval 305 & 104, and a seaclone skimmer. Not knowing the seaclone was junk when I bought it I went ahead and used it anyways. The whole time its been in use which is about 5 months I never collected anything so finally today I just took the thing off. The 305 has filter floss, fluval prefilter media, biomax, and seachem matrix bio meida. The 104 has biomax, carbon, and filter floss.
Starting off I got the tank set up and put in two clowns for the cycle. All went well and they were doing great. Later on down the line I added a lion that was about 4". Once again everything was going great. One of the clowns had something wrong with its eye and died. Few weeks later the other clown died out of no where. Water was testing fine and I was keeping up with water changes as well. Then the lion got sick with ich and a cloudy eye and refused to eat. Around this time I started getting some brown algea lookin stuff ALL OVER the tank and could not stop it from comming back. He got better and started eating/acting like normal again. Then a week later out of no where he stops eating and dies a few days later. I check everything out and sure enough everything is still reading fine, im still keeping up with water chances etc. Im petty good friends w/ the guy at petco who has a bunch of saltwater tanks and he told me to take in some water to test just incase my water was bad and something was going wrong w/ my kit or I was testing wrong. Sure enough everything tested out to be fine. So I bought an eel. The first night I had him he took a dive out of the tank and died too. So the next day I went and bought a lemon peel angel. He did good for about a week and a half. The next morning he had ich and was pale colored. A few days later he was dead.
After all that I said to hell w/ it im done with the saltwater. So I cranked up the temperature to about 85 and dropped the salt level some. I left it there for going on about 5-6 weeks now if not more. It seems like all of the brown crap that I talked about above is gone and all the water parameters are good. I thought about giving it a try again but im not interested in spending $25+ on a fish thats gonna die on me like the rest. Do you guys have any suggestions as to what I could go with?
I had great success with freshwater. I had a 11" pleco and 10" oscar that were doing great which I had for over a year. I had to make a big move for college which they didnt make. Once getting here I had some extra money and decided to go with saltwater after seeing it was a bit cheaper than I had thought.
The tank is a 55g with about 7lbs of live rock, a fluval 305 & 104, and a seaclone skimmer. Not knowing the seaclone was junk when I bought it I went ahead and used it anyways. The whole time its been in use which is about 5 months I never collected anything so finally today I just took the thing off. The 305 has filter floss, fluval prefilter media, biomax, and seachem matrix bio meida. The 104 has biomax, carbon, and filter floss.
Starting off I got the tank set up and put in two clowns for the cycle. All went well and they were doing great. Later on down the line I added a lion that was about 4". Once again everything was going great. One of the clowns had something wrong with its eye and died. Few weeks later the other clown died out of no where. Water was testing fine and I was keeping up with water changes as well. Then the lion got sick with ich and a cloudy eye and refused to eat. Around this time I started getting some brown algea lookin stuff ALL OVER the tank and could not stop it from comming back. He got better and started eating/acting like normal again. Then a week later out of no where he stops eating and dies a few days later. I check everything out and sure enough everything is still reading fine, im still keeping up with water chances etc. Im petty good friends w/ the guy at petco who has a bunch of saltwater tanks and he told me to take in some water to test just incase my water was bad and something was going wrong w/ my kit or I was testing wrong. Sure enough everything tested out to be fine. So I bought an eel. The first night I had him he took a dive out of the tank and died too. So the next day I went and bought a lemon peel angel. He did good for about a week and a half. The next morning he had ich and was pale colored. A few days later he was dead.
After all that I said to hell w/ it im done with the saltwater. So I cranked up the temperature to about 85 and dropped the salt level some. I left it there for going on about 5-6 weeks now if not more. It seems like all of the brown crap that I talked about above is gone and all the water parameters are good. I thought about giving it a try again but im not interested in spending $25+ on a fish thats gonna die on me like the rest. Do you guys have any suggestions as to what I could go with?
