3+ Months Into Keeping Tropical Fish - An Update And Singing The Praise Of UV

Hi All,

Been some time since I last visited, and now I'm 3+ months in to keeping my first tropical fish tank I've experienced all sorts of issues and problems.

Going from brown algae growth, to randomly dying fish without any signs of disease or unhappiness, to plants dying, having a frequent blooms of green algae in the water, water temperatures rising above 30 degrees in the hot weather, and unfortunately injuring a fish during a gravel clean (he's made a great recovery btw , and even a case of white spot! Not gonna lie its been stressful trying to troubleshoot all these problems, to finally solving it and then another problem arises 

Fortunately, over the last 3/4 weeks every seems to have stabilized, no fish have died recently and water is beautifully clear.

We struggled with green water for a good month, we tried reducing the feeding to every other day, to daily water changes, and blocking light out for 3-4 days at a time. Sometimes it'd work but when going back to a usual schedule the bloom would increase again. So I just wanted to share probably the best piece of equipment I've bought since getting everything set up - a UV Filter!!!!!! Its just been incredible at clearing the water, and took less than a week to do so!!! Below is the one I got and its just been fantastic!!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000S5JMWY/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Because I have it no longer am I worried about adding in plant fertilizer or keeping the lights on longer to help plants, its been great.

Our fish also look very settled, their colours are coming out nicely and are growing well, swimming well, and eating well. And water parameters are where they should be.

The only issue currently is plant growth and maintenance, unfortunately our broad leaf amazon swords have had shown poor signs of growth and keeping, all the leaves went transparent and eventually died. I tried adding in some root tabs just over a month ago, but this didnt have any effect on the old or newly growing leaves. we have cut off all the dead/dying leaves leaving basically just the new sprouts and small leaves. Also our java fern which is attached to a log is developing holes and brown patches on all the leaves.

Currently I'm adding in 2.5ml of Easy Life Carbo each day, and 5ml of Easy Life Pro Fito every 3 days.

If there are any plant experts out there which could help, I'd be happy to try provide pictures and more details to try improve our plants.


Other than that its been great learning and its really nice to see our fish (and shrimp!) looking healthy and swimming well

Tom