The Planted Tank Forum banner

Old days confessions!

3K views 41 replies 21 participants last post by  Nordic 
#1 ·
We see so many things to worry about, I thought it might relieve some new folks to know how bad many of us used to behave and still the fish and plants survived!
Maybe to get the real dirty dirt we need to set a time for the "old days"? Anybody want to start out by setting a time for what was the old days? Twenty years, thirty, fifty? Do we have enough old folks who will tell a few tales to make it entertaining?
Some story about how you "found" your first fish or plants? How you worked to get the first tank or you found things?
I've got plenty of my tales to tell, but better that some of you other "gentle folks" who have a few, adding your tale.
Want to tell how you cleaned tanks fifty years ago? Here's your chance.

My short story is that my first fish was fishing trip bait that we didn't use. They didn't last long though as we went fishing too often! It was a time when folks didn't let hobbies and fun interfere with food for the table.
 
#2 ·
I think a good timer table is 20 years and prior. I can say after being out of the aquarium hobby that things have drastically changed in that time period.
 
#3 ·
I was introduced to tropical fish back around 1952, when living in a small town in Missouri. Our local paper had an article about a dentist in a nearby town who had a tank in his office. I was fascinated, so I took a Greyhound bus to that town and saw his guppies and zebra fish. Great! I waited until he was ready to close the office and then talked to him about them. He invited me to visit his home where he had lots more tanks. Once there I decided I had to have some, so I persuaded him to sell me one of his surplus 10 gallon tanks - with enameled steel frame, with vals growing in it, and feeder quality guppies. We dumped out most of the water, and I carried it back home via Greyhound again.

When I got home I quickly replaced the incandescent light with a one tube fluorescent light, and set up the tank. I was cleaning it every week end. Removing everything in the tank, washing it out good, with soap and water, and resetting it up. The guppies reproduced until I had over a hundred, and the vals grew, no matter what I did. Summer came, and we had no air conditioning. The room temp climbed to 100F, and the fish began dying. By the end of summer all of them were dead, and the plants had died too. It was another 10 years or so before I had my next tank!
 
#13 ·
Did you know Walt Disney? I think he was from your state.
Do you have air conditioner now?

I have guppies and I have never seen 1 baby.

I have seen them for the platty and 1 for a black neon tetra but never any for guppies. I wondering if the other fish are eating them before they can be seen ?

Anyway, thanks for the story.
 
#4 ·
Got my first tank, a 10 gallon metaframe with stainless hood around 1965. I was 10. Remember the box filter that you filled with charcoal and filter floss made from fiberglass. Had platys, mollys and swordtails. And of course colored gravel. If I remember right my dad bought the tank from the Speigal catalog. Had tanks off and on ever since.

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk
 
#5 · (Edited)
TryMy parents bought my first tank when I was 9 or 10 which would have been around 1971 or 72. It was a 10 gallon with one of the Metaframe stainless flourescent hoods and colored gravel with a corner box filter powered by a Tetra pump. It was a community tank with a couple of angels, zebra danios, etc. I've had an aquarium ever since.
 
#6 ·
My dad brought home my first tank when I was 8; circa 1964. In the middle of summer. No stand, just a bare tank. An 8G Tall Metaframe. I thought the perfect place for it would be the Metal cover of the radiator in the living room. Sturdy enough for sure, and everybody could see it. If anybody here is old enough to remember those old-fashioned radiators that only had a thermostat in the basement where the oil burner was located, knows that the second and third floor apartments were subject to the whims of your landlord on the first floor. Our landlord had a real disdain for the cold. We never wanted for heat in winter and I thought the fish would be toasty-warm in winter over the radiator..............I'll never forget the "bulge" in those swordtails' eyes as they bobbed to the surface that first winter.
 
#7 ·
So… it's around 1955 or so and the local church has a 'Bazaar" . The usual stuff, I guess . You know , rides , rubbery food , and games; one of which involved buying 5 or so ping pong balls and trying to throw one into one of a multitude of small round fishbowls filled with colored water and each containing a goldfish . Amazingly , I got 2 in and ended up with 2 goldfish.So the next day my dad and me take the bus to the next town where there was a pet store ( which is still there , owned by the same family) bought a 5 gallon tank and some goldfish food which looked like Grape Nuts …. and I began my descent down the long slippery slope . Amazingly the fish lived almost 10 years .
 
#8 ·
My first tank was when I was 12 years old in the 7th grade. By the time I was 19, I had 6 10g, 1 20g and 1 29H. I had a cool little fish room in the apartment and I bred livebearers. Those were the days of corner, bubble up and undergravel filters, although most of my tanks were bare bottom. I somehow got the money to get a Vortex Diatom filter and was amazed at how it could convert cloudy water into crystal clear water in just a few minutes. In those days, we were pretty ignorant about the nitrogen cycle, but succeeded in spite of ourselves. I think the 'secret' was simply a few fish in enough water that the bacteria developed before the ammonia was a problem. Life's twists and turns took me away from the hobby. Then Abbey won a goldfish which led to a succession of acrylic tanks increasing in size, then a 10g. Gracie, the wonder fish, lived for several years, then sadly passed away. We then got (back for me) into tropicals and my interest in the hobby was reborn. Years ago now, I went to Petsmart looking for a hood for my old 29H and instead came home with a 60g ensemble (tank, stand, heater, filter...). I recently got the Finnex Planted+ 24/7 and planted....and on the story goes!!!
 
#9 ·
Hoppy and I may have been long distance neighbors in Missouri as we started fish! I was in SW Missouri and about 55 -58, I was assigned to help do the weekly cleaning (burnout?) of the tanks with my sister in law. Man, that was a process that should never be done. We took all the fish out in a bucket and cleaned every spot of everything. The idea was that you had to get it clean! Fish must have been tougher than is all I can figure as we did quite well selling fish to the LFS who was a distributer for the area towns around us. I managed to sell a lot of fish but then I discovered how much more they would pay for wood I could find 5-10 cents per fish or a buck for a piece of wood made me think wood was a goldmine. The fish took time to grow but the wood could be found pretty easy and just took a bit of cleaning and the bleach soak. I finally got enough fish and wood sold to buy the first car. ($25) I could find the wood on weekends, clean, soak, and let it dry during the week and sell it to buy gas for the next weekend! Gas was 18-25 cents a gallon.
 
#10 ·
I started keeping fish as a freshmen in high school back in 1984.
I have lots of stories, many of them on the marine side of things as well, including lots of stories about working at the LFS.

I've tried to good. I've taught husbandry classes, written articles, been a member of "the Crew" at WetWeb, boxed many many ears about the idiotic fallacy of "marine ich, C. irritans always being in your water"

HOWEVER....
One particular day while working at the store, and checking in fish from the wholesaler...well he had a bit of a situation.
You see after transport, all the fish are pale, and it's hard to tell one type of cory cat from another, or one type of tetra from another because
all their color is temporarily washed out. So we'd often put a bag in front of someone else's face and say "what is this?" and help each other out
so that we knew which tank to float the bag in.

Well on day someone got the idea of biting a small hole in the corner of a bag, holding it up and while the other guy was looking, trying to
identify, he squeezed the bag and shot water into his face. Well this happened again, and again, and then escalated into a full blown
fish room water fight among maybe 4 of us. I'm talking full on 5 gallon buckets of water being tossed over one bank of tanks onto a guy
working in the next row. (large fish room) but that wasn't the worst of it.

No the worst...and this is a true confession, and I would NEVER do this nowadays. We ended up tossing bagged Betta's at each other like water balloons.
We were soaked, the betta's were in slightly worse shape.

I KNOW I KNOW!! That's bad - but I was in my early 20's, I'm now 46.
I wouldn't have done that even in my late 20's.
We got in trouble....sort of. The assistant manager said if it happened again he'd just walk back there and start randomly firing people. We didn't take him very seriously, but we never did that again.
ALTHOUGH...it was the fishroom manager (another young guy) that started the whole thing. :red_mouth
 
#15 ·
1969 I was 9. Got my first stainless steel framed slate bottom 10 gallon tank from Ben Franklin. They had everything, corner bubble filter, colored gravel everything but fish. So I set it up let it run until my parents took me to the next town over that had a Kmart that sold fish.
I bought a couple platies and saved every baby!
 
#16 ·
In 1966 I was 8,I thought I'd do the fish in my 10 gallon a favor by warming the tank water after a cleaning.My cory immediately floated to the top upside down and I thought he was dead,so I fished him out and when I tossed him in the toilet he came back to life.I then fished him out with a net,cooled off my tank and put him back in.

That's how I learned cory cats like cooler water,lol.
 
#17 ·
freshman year of college I had a piranha. Of course friday night was feeding/beer night!

After class I hopped on my bike big with a gallon glass mayonnaise jar in my backpack to get minnows at the bait store.

Front tire dropped into a storm grate and over I go onto the glass jar. Sliced my back open.
I ride to the ER to get stitches, nurse yells at me for bleeding all over the reception area! LOL..
 
#18 ·
Might say I'm carrying on a family tradition. My aunt and uncle had a fish farm from 1950 - 1980. I've got films of a vacation at the farm in the 60's.
We went to Florida for our honeymoon in 1980 and got to see what was left of the farm after developers bought the property. All those old Metaframes. They were there for a lot of the "discoveries" and were friends with the greats of the time. I started my adventure a few months before we got married. And within the first year I was up to 20 tanks in a 1 bedroom apartment. Out of the last 35 years I think I've been tankless only while we were building this house. And of course it's skyrocketed.
There have been a lot of changes in that time. And a small bit of it is actually worth it. I've gone from the latest and greatest (read that as expensive) back to Lees corner air powered filters. After all this time I still find them working great in breeding tanks.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Nordic and Bushkill
#19 ·
Interesting stories one and all. I think the interesting thing reading these stories is not only how the hobby has changed but the people as well. I know my own fish keeping has changed as I have aged. When I was young I was all about the new world cichlids. I had a breeding pair of green terrors. I had red devils. I had an oscar that I hand fed live food. These days I find myself enjoying dwarf species and small 'community' fish like cories, oto, espeis. I still have cichlids and since I have really lined out my planted tanks and have them running smoothly I am turning my eye toward really improving my tanganyikan tank. As cool and 'exotic' as my altolamps are my tastes have changed and I spend more time watching my planted tank. It is indeed an interesting study in the evolution of a person.
 
#20 ·
29 gallon Metaframe with SS hood and 2 of those 6" or so light bulbs in 1968.
Had the slate hardscape for the back and 1/2 slate hardscape for the bottom.
Talk about a few years of getting zapped every day.
Learned to stand on a rubber pad and not touch the stand or perimeter of tank.
Finally a plastic style T12 hood went on, no more zap!:laugh2:

I was breeding convicts at the time supplying all LFS.
Only 1 tank, babies in buckets with airstones etc...
No heaters in the buckets, had to learn how close to place them near the baseboard heat.
My father thought I was nuts, "They won't buy them fish."
I made the calls during the week, Saturday very reluctant mind you,
we drove to 3 LFS and I came home with $40.
He never complained about the Saturday trips after that.

I was lucky, no massive fish deaths or fallouts.
I don't think cycling was an option then.
We were taught patience and stock your tank very slowly.
Water testing was limited to pH, I don't recall other tests.

Our LFS was located in a run down industrial park.
Rent was cheap I suppose and electricity at the time too.
Block building with a metal roof, no heaters in any tanks.
Compensated with gas heat or A/C in the summer.
Place smelled like you were walking on soggy Tetra flakes with a 100% humidity.
Mom always new of our visit you kinda wore the smell home.

Being young and amazed with how much water actually weighed?
They had a Metaframe cube type of tank suspended from the ceiling.
Guessing dimensions I would say a 3' cube.
They claimed it was a 180 gallon.
I would go no where near it fearing it would all crash down.
It housed a Pacu that was at least 2' someone gave to them when it was much smaller.
It did fail, the bottom started a slow leak and they had to replace it.

Enough memories for today.
 
#21 ·
I started tanks in about the 7th grade in 1966. Had a stainless framed 10 gallon with blue and green gravel, a stainless hood with colored incandescent bulbs and plastic plants. I eventually got another 10 for the bottom of the iron stand. I actually got to keep it in the dining room. Our local dump had an elderly black couple for caretakers. I think they might have actually lived there. They had kind of a permanent yard sale that was all stuff that people dumped and they scavenged. I started buying tanks from them with busted glass for 25 cents each. (stainless frame). Knock out the broken panel, replace it and glue and seal it with some kind of black aquarium sealant that came in a small tube and would dry hard. I was able to get several tanks going cheaply that way.

All my stock came from the back room of Heller's drug store. They even had some baby alligators for sale there at one time. They kept them in an old bathtub. I really wanted one but mom just wouldn't see things my way!
 
#22 ·
My hobby started in 1967 with a gifted 5 gallon stainless steel Metaframe with a few guppies, and a really noisy 1950's red air-pump and boxfilter.

The air-pump had a habit of going out of trim and making a really loud buzzing sound. It had a little brass thumb-wheel that you played with to make it pump less or more air. It was really awful, The new permanent magnet Whisper and Metaframe dual diaphragm pumps were like a godsend in comparison.

My need for more fish progressed to my buying from our little variety store that sold fish, plants, and more aquariums, with my extra chore money and birthday gifts. The guppy's BTW, reproduced at an alarming rate.

And with my parents house, our kitchen dining room had a pass-through shelf with a 96" two bulb fluorescent light fixture recessed above it. This became the natural place to eventually put all of my 10 gallon and that 5 gallon tanks, all four of them. I also discovered that the (cheaper..) Metaframe air powered SlimJim HOB filters were quieter, and took up less room internally than the gurgling box filters, but the SlimJims were also using siphon tubes, and were forever losing their siphon if I didn't keep up the tanks water levels.

As a young teen I discovered that we had a local Angelfish breeder who had set up in town and had 3, outside circular concrete pools filled with White Clouds. He also dabbled with breeding various rare tetras. I bought a small school of the WCMM from him for about 4 dollars, 50 cents a fish, and gave away all my baby guppies to my friends. My first egg-layer success was with White Cloud Mountain Minnows.

There was a local park with a big pond nearby that had annual spring hatchings of Daphnia in the fish-less part, and lots of baby goldfish spawned from the tossed and dumped goldfish living in the section with fish. The baby goldfish larva were easy to catch and fed my Gouramies and the Paradise Fish. It was also a good lesson in biology and what critters in the live food to not take home. Like discovering Gold Rimmed Water Beetle larva that would mow through your tank of little grow-outs in a couple days.

I also learned from my dad how to cut glass and I made a 17 gallon, square dimensioned tank from old 1/4" greenish plate-glass for my bedroom, that housed a few tetras and a Roundtail Paradise fish. (Try finding one of those nowadays..) My first success with Cryptocorynes, ( I think they were C. Affinis, dark, mottled green with reddish under-leaves and didn't mind low light levels.) was with the DIY tank.

That tank took a couple of build attempts to get it to not leak, big ugly silicone fillets was the key. I also got my first electric motor powered HOB filter for that tank, Forgot the maker, they sold it at Bi-Mart. It wasn't the Metaframe Dyna-Flow, but from that same year they appeared. It had a small, 110 AC volt, C-frame motor in a little, gray plastic housing with a little cooling fan, that fit into a molded in recess on the filter-box's rim and a drive shaft down to an impeller in the clear plastic pump base. It was really quiet and could pump far more water flow than that 15 gallon tank needed. But it also had a really large diameter, curved inflow siphon that was a big PITA to restart. I had to use my thumb to hold the water in because it was larger than my index finger, and was not an easy ergonomic exercise. Probably why is was cheaper than the Metaframe Dynaflow. I also had one of the last of the 'high flow' air-powered overflow type HOB's, but it didn't break the water surface much, and you'd get organic surface films with it.

I'm surprised I never killed or cooked my fish with those horrible old buzzy water heaters. I'm sure they never stayed within a few degrees of keeping the temperature stable, but they all seemed to work after a fashion.
 
#23 ·
Mention of the old filters brings up a point that has changed a lot. We get lots of questions about metals of any kind even being in/ around the tank water. Remember how much metal there was in everything we used before plastic got so common? Lead plant weights were real lead. Metal blades on the filters also. Are we breeding wimpy fish or is it just that we've all become worry warts?

That mention of the shocks you got from all the metal equipment? Nobody used or even knew about GFCI. That may indicate we've become a bit smarter as well!
 
#29 ·
Not sure about the metal blades Rich. My Dynaflows and the Aquamaster both have plastic impellers. Yes. I still have them and they still work. Heck I still have an old AquaKing that runs. No. I don't use them anymore. Even the shaded pole motor on the Aquamaster draws way more current than the Whispers I run now. And I'm still running the original Whispers I bought decades ago.

Bump:
I never figured out how to get the corner box filter to stay in the bottom - stupid thing always floated to the top. :D
Some of them have a plate that can be put under the gravel. I think it's the Lees 3 in 1 corner filter. That filter output is nice because you can fit a piece of rigid tubing from an UGF to get the flow closer to the surface. And it fits an airstone in for finer diffusion. I've only got one of those. The other 21 corner filters are the cheap ones. I add a bit of gravel to weight them down and use a suction cup and airline holder to keep it on the bottom.

Still have 2 of the HOB air powered filters I bought 30 years ago running also. Love them things.

Bump:
I used an air powered HOB for a short time on a 10 gallon that had a pair of Kribensis. I think it was a Hartz product also. My favorite HOB's were Dynaflos back in the late 70's - early 80's. You layered floss and carbon. The water flowed through the bottom and, of course, back into the tank. There was no issue with bypass and none of those wimpy cartridges of today. You probably had three times the media compared to a similar sized contemporary HOB.
The Dynaflows had two different types. One required the J tubes to siphon water into it and the water was powered out. The other was like today's Whisper type filter. I still have both of them.
 
  • Like
Reactions: GrampsGrunge
#24 ·
I once dropped a flourecent fixture into the tank... it kept on shining, and nothing died.

Then I learned you could clamp a watch battery between an LED's legs and throw it in the tank and it would keep shining... poor fish.

Oh and there was this one time I told a primary school friend he can leave his black moors in my tank while they go on holiday. My tilapia ate all their eyes within a day. :(
 
#25 ·
I never figured out how to get the corner box filter to stay in the bottom - stupid thing always floated to the top. I quickly abandoned it in favor of an air driven HOB made by...I assume Hartz but who knows. It came from either Hills or Kmart. I used those things for years. I don't know why I tossed them. Not one of my more stellar moments.

Only once had colored gravel - bright green. That was also my first intro with live plants - a piece of anacharis snuck in the bag with a goldfish. It grew. Never been able to get it to grow since.

My first tank was a christmas present. Mom was displeased. I wanted angelfish right off the bat. Nobody thought that a good idea so I ended up with half a dozen neons and a couple of scissortails, one of which jumped overnight. Never much liked neons, possibly because everyone pushed me into getting them. The tank quickly became filled with adult guppies before I decided I'd fooled around enough attempting to keep fish everyone else thought I should get, and got my angelfish. Of course, MTS set in about this time and suddenly I had 3 tanks, then 4, then back to one, then I got a larger tank, so back to two (the others got converted to gerbil headquarters).

Then marriage, kids, and more recently, inadvertently scoring pairs of adult angels and well... I don't know exactly how many angelfish I currently have but let's say over 100. The current main pair won't try parent raising until they're in their honeymoon suite - too much activity. Two more pairs seem to have formed in my display. God help me. :D
 
#27 · (Edited)
I never figured out how to get the corner box filter to stay in the bottom - stupid thing always floated to the top. I quickly abandoned it in favor of an air driven HOB made by...I assume Hartz but who knows. It came from either Hills or Kmart. I used those things for years. I don't know why I tossed them. Not one of my more stellar moments.
.....
Yeah Hartz, pretty sure my HOB power filter and the overflow air powered filters were Hartz products .

The old Metaframe design SlimJim HOB would be a good filter to bring back, they would be perfect on a Nano tank, no moving parts, about 20 GPH and with the airflow set just right they made a nice even whispering stream of water flow.

http://www.alloddballaquatics.com/vintage-aquarium-products-2.html
 
#28 ·
I used an air powered HOB for a short time on a 10 gallon that had a pair of Kribensis. I think it was a Hartz product also. My favorite HOB's were Dynaflos back in the late 70's - early 80's. You layered floss and carbon. The water flowed through the bottom and, of course, back into the tank. There was no issue with bypass and none of those wimpy cartridges of today. You probably had three times the media compared to a similar sized contemporary HOB.
 
#31 ·
I have no idea what brand the old metal filter was. It was used and old when I got it. The thing I remember most was the round metal motor that set someway on a bracket to hold it above water and then had a metal shaft and impeller. The center top had a bearing and place to oil it. The impeller was the final death as it finally rusted too much and the center fell out. That left the motor running but not moving any water.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top