member102986
- #1
My mum got the idea to start a tank of her own four years ago, after seeing my tank. So she bought a 7g tall. The problems begin. She bought a single fluval minI power compact lamp (not strong enough to reach the bottom of the tank). Then she bought this really gross red clay-like substrate without capping it, so it muddied up the water for hours after every disturbance. She bought a piece of driftwood and tied anubias nana to it. She also wanted a sort of sloped "mountain" so she bought a bunch of rocks. (River rock, lava rock, slate, petrified wood, quartz and dragonstone, it's like a rock circus). Unfortunately the tank was very tall and narrow so there wasn't enough room for a "mountain" let alone with the driftwood, so it ended up being very crowded and difficult to clean. This caused detritus to build up inches deep. She also had a crinum calamistratum and some water Sprite that I gave her. She tried dwarf hairgrass but it died immediately. Oh, and there's no fish. She didn't get a filter, only an airstone and she used pure tap water for water top ups. (She never vacuumed, or changed the water). She also kept the tank by the window so it grew brown diatoms EVERYWHERE, but that went away eventually when she got an infestation of tiny ramshorn snails. The tank sat like this for three years. She finally decided she didn't like the tank sitting like that so I helped her buy a new, easier tank. I got her a 9g cube kit and sand (she chose white) to replace that awful substrate. She got a second fluval light and I got her to move the tank further away from the window so it gets less sunlight. I even set up the tank for her, moving and cleaning everything and even re-scaped it for her. Unfortunately, she continued to mistreat the tank. She rarely cleaned it, and when she did she vacuumed up more sand than detritus so she quickly had very little sand left but a lot of yuck. She also had the lights on a timer for 12 hours of light a day. So she quickly got a nasty case of blue-green algae which the snails couldn't combat. I got her to turn the lights down to four hours of light and got her an aquaclear filter to up the flow (the kits filter was terrible) and two nerites to eat what's left. The algae went mostly away, but it grew in the sand turning it from a crisp white to blue-green. She got depressed at it and didn't touch it at all for months except to add water, so again it built up inches of detritus. A year later I got her 20lbs of black sand, more than enough to make a decent bed which won't stain. And I cleaned and re-scaped it again for her. I spent 8hrs doing a massive overhaul to clean out the 3 inches of muck, algae and rotting plants and wood, picking out every last millimeter-sized snail to save the colony, trimming and re-attaching the anubias and then put it all back together in an aesthetically pleasing way, all the while it's 2am, I'm exhausted and my back is absolutely killing me. (Oh, and she also had me move it back to the window) I thought to myself, I'm tired of doing this, so I'll just do the weekly cleanings for her. (She's also expressed interest in getting shrimp and guppies so she needs a clean tank and regular schedule). So the next week on the dot I clean the tank, but she gets all offended because I'm "passive aggressively saying she's not doing a good job". She says she'll clean it weekly from now on, now that she knows she needs to be doing that if she wants critters. (Guess what? She skipped last week). Now today it is cleaning day, a lo and behold she cleaned it. Sort of. She missed most of the poop of course. And she washed the filter (two weeks after I did it) in TAP WATER. I try to mention these things, trying to explain she needs to clean better and to not clean with tap water. It's bad enough she won't buy water conditioner. But she just got very mad, blaming me and telling me I'm saying she's being "willfully stupid". I'm tired of doing these overhauls but I'm also tired of hearing her complain that her tank doesn't look good. I'm tired of jumping through hoops to make her tank look good and work well. I'm sorry about the rant but I don't know what to do, she won't listen to me, I've tried to help her for four years but she just won't take my advice.