Week 2: Initial Test and Water Change!

 Hello! Hanah here again✌😁

So today IS THE DAY of the first water change. I prepared the new conditioned water with all its treatments and plant nutrition. I sealed it in a 5gal bucket with Saran Wrap and tape to make sure nothing got in until I can buy a proper bucket with a lid from Home Depot or something! I couldn't change it yesterday since I need the water to be properly conditioned over 24hrs. I also began to label each syringe I would be using for each chemical and plant nutrition fluids and put those instruments in separate baggies, one for Tank Water chemicals and another for Plant nutrition chemicals.

However, I did go ahead and my first water test with the Fresh Water kit and recorded my initial data for the tank this week. Everything was good except the pH and the Nitrates. I was a little annoyed since this has been the issue since the passing of my other snail in the tank/: So, no. Not that good. Here is a picture of that.

Even though I'd be more alarmed if the Ammonia and Nitrites were high instead of Nitrates, this is still something I need to fix soon before Vincent(betta fish) and Gary(Nerite snail) begin to get affected. To my fortune, this is easily fixed with good and big water change. I decided to do an initial 60% water change to not stress the fish with a drastic change tonight. Every week, I will be checking the water for Nitrates and doing 20% water changes as needed until I can get the Nitrates level back to 0 ppm. Something awesome that I came to learn is that if the Nitrate levels increase, the pH levels decrease significantly. Realizing this honestly made me feel a little more confident of a good research question and a much better hypothesis revolving around these two variables. I'd love suggestions if you have 'em! Some of my constants will be temperature and volume, and waste(food digested by Vincent and Gary). I will also be controlling the amount of time I will be leaving the light on in the tank since I am currently having a big algae problem.

Vincent has been digging some of my front plants, so I will be replanting those. During the water change, I will be taking Vincent out into a separate small tank, including Gary,  to gently scrub the algae off of the plants and his house. I want to do some trimming to the dead leaves since that can also influence Nitrate spikes. I will also be doing a 50% change in the biofilter media just enough so there isn't too much sludge but enough so that the beneficial bacteria aren't disturbed. This IS the one thing that helps break down ammonia and nitrites and keep the cycle going, so we do NOT want to kill that.

I will be doing a water test again after 24 hours to see how things are, then check in a week again before the next water change.