Weekly Aquarium Maintenance

Today was Friday - and that means that I did a water change! I removed four gallons of aquarium water and added back in four gallons of replacement water. This time I *dosed* the replacement water as follows:

• 4.0 gallons tap water
• 0.5 teaspoon of SeaChem Equilibrium
• 1.0 ml of SeaChem Flourish
• 2.0 ml of SeaChem Flourish Excel
• 0.125 teaspoon of SeaChem Acid Buffer

I've noticed that my general hardness has been rising fairly drastically in the aquarium, so I cut back on the usage of SeaChem Equilibrium, and I also didn't want to spend a great deal of time aerating the water after the acid buffer addition to raise the pH back up to normal, so I reduced the amount of SeaChem Acid Buffer added.

I also took some time to kill some more snails. Ever since that false identification of "killifish eggs" that were, in fact, snail eggs, I'm seeing a large number of egg batches and tiny snails. I'm planning to kill any snail that I can get to with my Azoo Aqua aquaplant clip.



On another note, my CO2 injector has thus far proven to be a failure: I'm pretty sure that I created something that *could* regulate CO2 and even could inject CO2 into the aquarium. However, I failed to think or plan for the fact that my CO2 holding tank would simply be holding CO2 at atmospheric pressure (or even a little above that). The reason that this caused (and causes a failure) is that the diffuser and even pumping air into a tank needs to be under a greater than the pressure exerted by the water at whatever depth the CO2 receptacle will be (whether that be a glass diffuser or a holding tank for CO2). At this point, I guess I will be looking for a more professional CO2 injection system - and hoping that I don't have to spend a bundle to get/create one...