Bill (Tshethar)'s First Grow-out Project

[cedar]

so very sorry to read your thread and i can't believe the difficulty you have had. I sure do hope you get the chance and the courage to try again some time. best to you and yours.

[Dave-UK]

silly question, but how are you transporting water from the ageing barrel to the tank?

[Tshethar]

Bill are they gasping at the water surface?

No, no gasping, though thanks for asking. Never has seemed like they were starved for oxygen (or suffering from ammonia poisoning, which maybe could have been a worry with filter maintenance). You pretty much saw the symptoms in that last video: they start getting paranoid and panicky, darting for hiding places and whirling when they find themselves in open water. Then usually they would expire within a day or two. (And that's what happened to the small flachen in the video, though he also had jumped and taken a fall as well.)

so very sorry to read your thread and i can't believe the difficulty you have had. I sure do hope you get the chance and the courage to try again some time. best to you and yours.

Thanks for the sentiment--you, too, with your tanks present and future! Honestly, I'm sure I'll try again sooner or later, and I'm grateful to the forum to help me keep perspective. I hadn't been keeping up daily with events on here and I mentioned something via PM to another forum member about possibly trying some discus from Eric at Carolina Discus; I then learned that he had posted a couple of days prior about an accident with a faulty valve causing him to lose most everything he and his family had been working with in his fishroom over a three year period. My story kind of sucks, but not at that order of magnitude.

I think if it was just me, I might jump right back into it, but I'm going to try to be sensitive to the patience the whole operation has required of my wife, who enjoyed neither the slow death and decline of the fish nor the commitment level, anxiety and sprawling equipment the whole undertaking spawned. It's probably a good idea to do something a little less ambitious to try to win back the household on the good parts about the hobby....

silly question, but how are you transporting water from the ageing barrel to the tank?

I picked up a cheap but powerful submersible pump on Ebay--something made in China but rated for around 1000 gallons/hour. I have a length of 1" vinyl hose hooked up to it that sits at the ready in the handle of the trash can, and I plug it in when it's time to fill. Ricardo has a link somewhere for a wireless remote control one can also add to a setup like this in case it's inconvenient to pull the plug on the pump while filling at the same time.