Numbers are all in the “ok” range except chlorine, which is a little strange since we’ve dosed with chlorine treatment plenty.

So what’s zeolite for if not to keep bacteria in?

Update

We decided we wanted the plants to grow properly so (after lots of research and advice seeking) we emptied everything out and put in special plant soil and covered it with black gritty stuff.  We re-planted the original plants and put in some more. The original plants had been nibbled bare by the plecs which were apparently Ancistrus.  These we gave to the fish shop, and swapped them for two little orange dwarf plecostomus.  They also sold us some CO2 potion and plant food.  The plants grew pretty well before but with CO2 and food they should do much better.

Two of our baby guppies (out of about 8) survived, one is doing very nicely and looks like a small fish, the other still looks like a fry.  The other female guppies still look pregnant but not much is happening.  The water was really murky after we put the new substrate in despite rinsing it for ages, but it’s not so bad now.

Here’s the new tank.  My wife has decided she hates it, but I much prefer it to the gravel.

If you have a second tank you can decant your fish to for a few days, I’d put in one of these Juwel foam textured type backgrounds. I like the black granite one, a well planted aquarium with dark substrate looks fantastic against it.

We don’t have a second tank, nor do we have the room or inclination for one.

The lack of backdrop is a thing, for sure – at some point we’ll move the pictures that were there before, but apart from that the plan is to simply have plants as backdrop.

Update:

We tried again with blue dwarf gouramis some months later, but they always died.  Apparently a common issue.  The only fish so far I really loved having – beautiful and fascinating to watch – but after we lost three I had to give up.  We do weekly water changes, we have test strips and now a liquid drop testing kit, and everything has always been fine.  We followed all the advice but they just slowed down and died.

The other fish are fine generally, but had a few deaths here and there.

We now have:

9x harlequin rasboras

3x mollies

1x ruby tipped shark

1x dwarf plecostomus

‘Some’ guppies, hard to keep track!

It sounds a lot when listed out, but I’m monitoring the Ammonia and it’s not bad according to what I’ve read.  It exceeds the number of ‘fish inches’ for the size of tank (150l) but they are all small fish.  It certainly doesn’t look full.

We also removed the old stones and put in soil and substrate to allow us to plant a shedload of plants.  The original lights turned out to be rubbish so we bought a full spectrum LED from ebay and the plants shot up.. until their CO2 requirements got too high.  Algae started to grow too.  Using liquid CO2 didn’t help much so now I’ve got a cheap DIY CO2 kit from ebay and it works really well using citric acid and sodium bicarbonate.

The plants are photosynthesising so much that by the end of the day there are as many oxygen bubbles coming from the plants as there are CO2 bubbles coming from the diffuser.  Will have to see how they grow.  I’ve read that one way to get rid of the black beard algae is to get the plants to grow really well with CO2 and out-compete the algae for nutrients.

No fish deaths for ages.