(Part 2) Top products from r/Jarrariums

I would suggest just going crazy on your filtration and getting an Aquaclear 50. It's suitable for 20-50 gallon tanks and you can put a whole lot more media in there. I have an AC 20 on my mother's 5.5 gallon betta tank and that works very well, barely any current at all and neons can deal with currents very well and the shrimp won't care.

I would return the filter and get an adjustable one off amazon for the same or less. There is a 20 gallon, 100 watt heater on amazon for $11.80 with prime, so I would go for that. Had them in my tanks and I haven't had one break or malfunction in the year and a half I've had them. Great deal!

15W for lights, might be a little low for plants in a 20 gallon, so get beginner level plants.

Important: research fishless cycling in an aquarium. This is how you will have the most success in the aquarium world. Better for your fish and better for your sanity when you put the fish in. It will get that nitrogen cycle pumping at 100%, so it will be ready for all the junk from your fist few fish.

As far as substrate, I have heard of black diamond blasting sand and this is what it looks like in an aquarium. I believe I have it in mine. It's very cheap, but is very dirty so when you get it, you'll have to rinse the dust out of it. It will take several rinses. Do this in a rubbermaid or a 5 gallon bucket (get them at lowes or home depot. If you want to get some marble for rock piles, lowes sells broken product and will throw in a bucket for free usually). DO NOT rinse it in your tank, it may scratch your glass. 98% of aquarium substrate needs to be rinsed, just throw about 3/4 or a full gallon in a 5 gallon bucket and swish it around. This black diamond stuff sometimes has little glass things in it, so use a glove or a stick (I used a well-washed spatula) and tap water.

You won't need to gravel vac in a properly cycled, planted aquarium. Trust me, especially with that filter, you won't need to, and that's a blessing. The beginner plants will grow under almost any light, and root tabs are a must for sand, especially in new aquariums. It depends what kind of gravel, but plants will usually take hold. I like sand because the poop either gets trapped where I can't see it or gets circulated to the filter.

I believe that's marbled(?) pothos. It works really well for sucking out the nitrates. I have a clipping clipped on the edge of my other tank, and it's working VERY well like that, so you could clip one on the edge of your tank next to your filter cutout. They do have different water roots than soil roots, so just get a cutting of viney part and make sure some of it is wet and there you go. Ferts also help these guys, and all I use is flourish excel and comprehensive, but you don't need to get into all that quite yet.

personally, I love the snails, they clean up my overfeeding, which leads to bad algae problems, my buddy killed all of his and got bad algae so I always have snails in my tanks.

As far as shrimp, they won't overpopulate when pressured by the tetras. they will eat the babies and the bolder ones will pester the adults a bit, so they won't breed as often. If your tank gets overrun (which it won't), you could try and sell them back to the store for store credit, or you could sell online.

Plants and shrimp: aquabid.com It's pretty much the ebay of the fish keeping world. notice that if it doesn't say snail free, you may get hitchhikers, which are not necessarily bad things. It takes maybe 24 hours to get an account (because of wait) so apply tonight.

DO NOT buy a feeder fish to 'jump start' your tank. It's inhumane and will take the exact same time (probably longer now that I think about it) as fishless cycling with ammonia would. You REALLY need to research that. Basic premise is, raise ammonia to 3ppm, monitor it every night, when you see it drop, bring it back up. Then when it disappears in ~3 days, check your nitrites, get them back to readable levels via water changes, then add ammonia, watch nitrates drop, and when you can get from 3ppm ammonia to 0ppm ammonia and 0 ppm nitrites, in 24 hours, then you can add a few fish. This is where you need a liquid test kit, not a test kit with strips, they can be unreliable.

this is a good source about fishless cycling. I haven't used dr. Tim's and my buddy got frustrated and crashed his tiny tank (after using Dr. Tim's, buddy's fault, not tim's) when he first started, so I have no idea how it works. I have just used ammonia both times I've cycled a tank.

Wait until you have a nice home for your fish before you shove them in there. You would want to wait until your home has A/C, a roof, walls, and is free of asbestos before you move in, right? Same with fish, be nice to them and you'll have a whole lot less headaches when it comes to ammonia spikes and stuff like that.

I'm just saying the yellowing of your plants mean they aren't getting enough light. If the ends turn brown and start molting/rotting, it's a nitrate deficiency. Shrimp (shellfish in general) are particularly sensitive to nitrate changes, so I was suggesting you make the amendments before you add the fauna.

You have a few options:

Full restack:

• Put a base layer of aquarium substrate (usually clay based) fertilizer/nitrate-infused (I use Seachem Plant Base, https://amzn.to/2Z6gfmA and it's enough in one bag for a 10-gal tank, so you should have plenty to spare. Layer should be about an inch high in a jarrarium
  
  
• Put in your substrate on top of the soil. You can use anything organic, but not plastic gravel
  
  *Plant your plants
  
  
• Top off with 1/4" more substrate to help them stay seated and start rooting.
  
  
• 24-hour light cycle until the plants start showing green, then you can swap for your normal hours.
  
  If you have temperature control where the jarrarium will be, you can use direct sunlight to kick-start the plants, but if not the Sun will make the water too hot (and the hot-cold scale to lengthen to be too dramatic for most life beyond snails).
  
  The other option, with much less effort is to just use a spoon or a long cylinder (like a tank vacuum tube) and fill it with the nitrate soil, then jam it into the jar to the bottom and release it on the way out. Same concept as nitrate "plugs" you see at the store, but much more natural and much less likely to induced burn on the plants.
  
  As with any living ecosystem, it's all about the balance, which can only be achieved with a cycle. With still-water, you'll only get gas exchange at the site of the plant, not in the surrounding ambient water. So getting a large pond or apple snail will help physically move around the water and get things mixing.
  
  For a REALLY great start, you can use the soda-bottle hack to make a DIY CO2 bubbler, put it in the jar with a lid, then it will bubble (and mix) through the water and infuse the water with plenty of CO2 for the plants to thrive. Then when the bottle is empty/spent after a few days, you can let it stabilize for a day and add shrimp by the weekend.
  
  If you want more details/recs, I'm extremely happy to help.
  
  Also, I've started a YouTube channel for old game restorations, but I also make custom LED lights, if you have a request (at cost < $10-$15 shipped).

Oh ok, well, while it was still probably unfortunately something from the stream. It's also possible that once one shrimp died there was no bacteria in the filter to take care of the ammonia. You can read up on the Nitrogen Cycle on the r/Aquariums sub off to the right and there's probably also some info under the tabs at the top. You'll need to get a sponge filter for the bacteria to live on. That's what handles all the stuff that builds up in an aquarium. I'm sort of surprised there were no problems from this before, but at the same time, shrimp have such low bioload, I'm also not surprised since they don't produce too much normally. An easy fix for your situation is to grab a Fluval prefilter sponge like this and slide your airstone inside, making your own sponge filter. It's inexpensive at Petco/Petsmart, like $3. But, since you only have 1 shrimp and a few snails left, it's very important to keep what bacteria you have left in your tank going until you add something else living to the tank that will produce food for the bacteria. I suggest you keep "feeding" the tank a little bit of food every couple of days. And that you also grab a bottle of beneficial bacteria at the LFS like Seachem Stability which is very good for keep the bacteria going in a tank. Just dose a ml or two every couple of days to keep things going too.

You should probably also continue to do small regular partial water changes every 3-5 days to get rid of whatever toxins may be in the water that killed the dwarf shrimp from the waterway. (just add the water back in gradually/slowly) And you may ask at your LFS for a mild treatment for the tank before adding anything new.

Good luck!

Tbh when my plants go transparent like that they are usually dead, but I’m not familiar with that species so idk for sure! If your water is hard as you say- have you thought about using some fertilizer and especially water conditioner water conditioner? Can go a long way in keeping plants happy. Good luck!

I only started with my jar a few months ago, but here's what I've learnt. I knew going in that a jarrarium would be a bit of a challenge in some ways, but now I understand what makes it so. With such a tiny amount of water in the jar, any small change can lead to big changes in water chemistry. Most aquarium chemicals (should you need to use them) are made to dose larger tanks, and as such you basically have to measure out drops with an eyedropper / syringe to use them in a jar. You have to think a lot about your inputs into the jar in terms of light, temperature, nutrients, etc. because introducing something in excess might cause algae blooms, plant or fauna distress, etc. And it's very easy to do things in excess because, again, it's such a tiny jar.

That said, my jar seems to be going okay so far and I've learnt a lot about the chemical / biological processes in an aquarium that I think I might have missed if I was trying to set up a larger tank. Diana Walstad's book helped a lot too - the whole book, not just the PDF linked in this sidebar. If you are slightly obsesssive like me, don't mind having a jar that might have a bunch of weird things growing in it, and are happy to take things very slowly, a jarrarium is fun!

Cool, thank you so much for the reply. I bought two pieces of cuttlebone sold for birds, actually, because I read elsewhere that they were fine for snails, and broke off a smallish chunk and put it in the tank a couple of weeks ago. It did float for a day or two but it's happily nested in a back corner now.

pH is testing right around 7, which is a tad better than it was before. Our mystery got out of the tank one night and chipped its shell pretty hard when it fell, so I've been kind of paranoid and overprotective of it since and want to be sure the water doesn't get too soft.

I've been doing my research. :) Ordered the Aqua Clear 50 as you suggested and I am buying ammonium chloride and a testing kit off Amazon. Also signed up for aquabid. :)

I considered Dr. Tim's bacteria but I decided to do it the slow way instead, because why not.

I found out the type of fish tank I wanted to do is the low light low-tech tank, so I'm reading up on them right now. I read about this scientist who makes fishtanks where you don't have to change water for months at a time when I was a kid. Apparently she writes books on the subject.

Going to do some more research and try to get this right.

In terms of how I siphon water out of the fish tank, will something like this work? http://smile.amazon.com/Python-Pro-Clean-Gravel-Washer-Aquarium/dp/B001V6Y3LY/

I decided to use Miracle Gro topped with some kind of sand for my substrate. Will this suck out all of my substrate?

I've used a few of these sponge filters in my setups and recently bought one of these heaters that seems to work pretty well, but might take up too much space in a tiny setup.

Bormioli Rocco Fido Clear Jar, 169 Oz. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0001BMYI4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_ztJWDbNTW8316

The best Jarrarium substrate IMO.

Composed of crushed lava rock, its porous, Ph neutral, and you don't need to wash it beforehand.

I’ve seen them on amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Fun-Express-small-FLAMINGO-Ornaments/dp/B000SDOY9C

Large, thicker glass bowls aren't cheap but really pretty... without going Biorb crazy expensive, Acrylic bowls are an sturdier, easy-to-scratch option but doesn't usually have a flat bottom. Gotta improvise with some PVC tubing base about 1-2 inches thick in a larger diameter.

Turkey baster, about $3 at Target.

https://smile.amazon.com/Norpro-5900-Nylon-Baster/dp/B000HEIUBU

https://www.amazon.com/Anchor-Hocking-2-5-Gallon-Brushed-Aluminum/dp/B000M9NMJA/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=2+gallon+jar&qid=1573022558&s=home-garden&sr=1-6

This 2.5g has a sealing lid

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001LE1VC/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This is the one I purchased and only used a pinch of

when i had a bowl (something i recommend to any one on this sub) i used a weaker version of the bulb i put in a normal desk lamp, and i managed to get some crypts to grow quite big with some willow moss

HOB is Biomaxx Nano (sold as lo as Azoo Mignon 60, Aquarium Masters power filter), adjustable flow and you always could add a baffle from water bottle.

Internal, the smallest from what I could find, is Tom Aquatics mini internal filter, sometimes sold as Tom Dive Clean filter. Filter cage could be removed, and replaced by piece of filter floss on gutter guard mesh (large cell plastic mesh). Its 45 gph could be pointed upward, then no mess inside he tank.

Sponge filters, even mini, are too big, if it's not a long tank.

which LED you use for the jar? and how big is the jar? I have a 2.5 gal from target, but I can't find a light dedicated to it

was thinking about this - what you think?

http://www.amazon.com/Finnex-Might-Light-White-Blue/dp/B00480QDBI/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1394566663&sr=8-5&keywords=finnex+led+60