Water Quality and Temperature For Discus Fish Part -3

Part- III

Water Quality and Temperature

  So I have had the most success was simply pointing the return down now when you have a few breeding tanks what I did was put them on Iraq and the top tanks would rain down to the bottom tank the bottom tank but then drain down to the sump the sub would return back to the two top tanks and that would complete the cycle i would also have all of the growth tanks tied into that same filter the way I had this setup is what in my opinion is why I had the most success with the fry as i move the fright of their grow tanks absolutely everything was identical the temperature the perimeters the 

quality everything all I had to do is scoop them up from one tank and put them in the other there are everything was identical because everything was connected at the same sub again I kept it simple but focused on consistency you might also be thinking about lighting and does the tank need lighting I guess the short answer is yes it should have some sort of lighting after all the discs need to see each other and the fry need to be able to see their parents I don't suggest you do this in complete darkness a lot of the times though if your room is bright enough that will do however what I do is have subdued lighting over the tank and at night time when these lights would go off i have ambient light some 

where’s in the room so that the tanks did not go pitch black I found that when the tanks would go pitch black the fry would lose their parents and I lose some by the morning time when you'll find you'll have to do is try to find the right lighting balance for your situation so ensure that you can turn lights out at night yet have some sort of an ambient light available what I did was actually have a plug-in nightlight really close to the tank on an extension cord that worked really well for a night light so that's it for the tank setup now let's move into water parameters water quality maintenance diet conditioning that pairs and triggering them and then raising the fry with the idea of what you need for breeding set up now let's talk about water parameters what should you be aiming for this might cause some controversy and quite frankly I don't care because this is a method and a philosophy that I apply to my entire hobby and every fish that I keep the water in my aquariums matches the parameters of the water coming out of my tap meaning that they are the same p.m. h and 

the same hardness which is typically two parameters that most people chase when it comes to discus for example my ph ranges from seven point four to seven . six depending on the time of the year and I have really hard water but you see I provide my aquarium inhabitants with consistent water parameters you see I actually did an entire Blog talking about this in the past and it's called my aquarium philosophy and highly suggest you watch it because I go into this in more detail the fact of the matter is this I find that when it comes to disk is keeping too many hobbyists are chasing ideal as opposed to consistency I'll explain further what that means ideal meaning they read a book that was written 20 years ago where they went on a forum and somebody said that they need a low pH and very soft water you're not going to be successful yet the person asking the question has really hard tap water and are different definitely a higher pH so they're constantly adjusting it and changing it and 

struggling with it and chasing that i deal perimeter but you got to ask yourself what would be really better consistency or chasing that ideal perimeter that is constantly fluctuating if i can successfully keep a fish in water that is similar to my tap water then I don't want to keep it at all because in the long run i'm just going to stress it out make my hobby a lot of work and it's not going to be any fun anymore now I'm not saying all your desk need to be kept at ph 7.4 7.6 and hard water I'm just saying that you have to become more comfortable with what you have you see discus are extremely domesticated these days and the disc is that are being raised and sold are being breed in large numbers and water that's already very similar to yours they've already adapted to common tank water parameters now of course this doesn't apply to wild discus as they would definitely not be able to adjust as easily again though when i first got into disk as I chased ideal parameters and had horrible horrible results as soon as I became more comfortable with what I had and focused on providing consistent water quality and consistent parameters based on the parameters that are coming out of my 

tap I had huge success so I'll ask you this put ph and hardness out of your head for now unless you have the extremes extremely high or extremely low being below 6 or above eight anything in that range in my opinion is most likely going to be acceptable focus on keeping it consistent the next thing you want to kind of look at is temperature will get to quality in a minute but this is the last parameter that I look at in fact i'll be honest and it's the only perimeter that I care about again though this is just all my opinion and how I keep discus and how I had successful this is not how everybody does it when it comes to temperature i keep that simple as well 28 degrees Celsius or 82 degrees Fahrenheit anything around there is fine with me 27 28 29 degrees Celsius for example I'm totally comfortable with this case do like warmer water now I've heard people having success with much warmer and much cooler water but again this is what I do and in fact I keep all of my tanks at that temperature there is not an aquarium in my house that you couldn’t test the water for ph hardness temperature ammonia nitrite nitrate and they will all match ok so let's move on to water quality and maintenance so there's two ways that you can maintain your water quality for the most part which is your involvement and that is through water changes or a drip system I have done both now when it comes to discus people like to change a lot of water a lot of the time and discus do well with lots of water changes but it could be argued that all.