Got The Fish Tank Blues Today

Tank maintenance always takes so much longer than expected. It's very easy to spend a whole afternoon on one tank - and sometimes it looks worse after maintenance than before (but that may just be my plant trimming "skills").
Glad to hear that the plants and algae are starting to look better. I'm sure it won't be too much longer until your tank is settled and the positives of owning the tank heavily outweigh any negatives.
We all go through ups and downs with our tanks, and sometimes the responsibility of creating & maintaining a suitable environment for our fishy friends weighs heavily.
Keep at it, you're doing fine. 

As I've just written in response to your pic (before reading this thread), I get real tank envy when I see your tank. Honestly, it, the plants and the fish all look great to me. Perhaps I ought to show you a few close-ups of mine, with the extremely BBA-ridden anubias with some awful-looking dead leaves, the massive plant (an online purchase error) dumped in the middle and which won't stay weighted down so has now actually had several of its leaves singed by the light above which it touches (hoping there's not a fire risk with this?!), plant debris across the substrate, pieces of fungused pellets, fungused snail poo, the plants permanently covered in a brown/red dust which is actually from the root tabs after getting disturbed during the weekly maintenance, yellowing leaves due to other plants over-shadowing them, hornwort needing tapped after every feed because it's got pieces of fish-food flake entangled in it, etc. The plant debris, fungused pellets and fungused snail poo and some of the yellowing plant leaves will get removed during tomorrow's water change but it won't be more than a day or so before the previous status returns. Hope that context helps. What is most important, in my book anyway, is being able to keep the fish and invertebrates alive, and that provides me with the satisfaction I need, while admiring the aesthetics of others' tanks such as your own.

Honestly...  You guys are the best...!!!   

It's all about balance... finding this is a definite art and not a science and it will come with time. I too have a massive colony of tiny pest snails I'm battling at the moment. Im quite happy to keep at it though till things calm down. I find tank maintenance to be a very good distraction from the stresses of daily life...

Re substrate bubbles... you should find the start to reduce over the coming months... fits with the timescales on mine.

lololol...  Priceless Donna, priceless...   

Yeah, for sure Donna...  Funny old thing, the way the hassles can get to you...  But looking good today - only thing is the little micro ramshorn snail numbers do seem slightly up at the mo...  Just keep plucking them out when I can see them, being great a believer that manual removal is by far the best control method...

The temptation to get a smaller second tank is a killer, for sure...  I could have one in my office room, where the computer is...  Can't help thinking that it would be wise - in my case - to hold fire a little though, and get the main tank on an even keel first... 

Another thing to look out for when trying to control pest snails is the eggs. In my tank they look like tiny frogspawn, in 2 lines on a leaf. Total length about 1cm. I don't try to look for them, but if some happens to catch my eye - especially when I'm doing plant maintenance, I quickly whisk them out. Or knock them to the substrate where I'm fairly confident they'll be eaten by one of several fish species I have.

Snail eggs are one of those things that are hard to spot. But once you've seen them and learned what you're looking at, they drive you mad because you see them everywhere. At least, that's what happened in my tank.

In my tank I thing (snail) egg predators include kuhlis, rasboras (2 species, 3 if you count the m. Kubato) fiveband barbs and maybe the rainbow fish. Hmm that's everyone except my BN Plec! Maybe that's why the snails no longer bother me. 

The trouble with actual snails is that fish usually suck them out of the shell to eat them, and there aren't that many fish which can do that. Lots more will eat snail eggs, and also the snail body if the shell is crushed so they can get at it.
I have those tiny ramshorns and 'pond' snails in both my tanks, together with nerites and black malaysian trumpet snails which I bought. The betta's tank is currently empty, awaiting work under the worktop in the kitchen before I get a new betta. All that's in there is sand, filter and heater and I am feeding ammonia to keep the bacteria alive. But I do have livestock in there too - MTS and 'pond' snails. Ammonia does not kill these snails. The MTS leave wonderful trails in the sand overnight 

We had only dial up internet until about 2004, so all my research was done using out of date books in the library. These books said snails were bad as they transmitted disease to the fish in the tank. So I spent years trying to eradicate the ramshorn snails which were the only ones I had back then, and finally gave up trying. I now know that snails in the tank are a good thing - and not just nerites. So I put up with the two pest species - though I do suck out the ones on the glass during a water change.  I don't know if it's the ramshorns or the 'pond' snails, but one of them lays eggs inside a horseshoe shaped piece of jelly. I suck those out as well when I see them.