PlanetCatfish.com

Hi all,

New to the site,this is my first post

I am moving house and will not have room for my current 50gal tank! I will be buying a 32gal tank in the next few weeks and I'm starting over in terms of the fish I'm going to keep.

I have always been a lover of catfish and keep 2 small Pimelodus (dont have the room for anything else) I need a pleco for my new 32g tank but I would like this fish to fit this bill,if possible.

Small (ie 5-6 inches) relatively common,good algae(spl?) eater (green and brown) not to shy and good looking. Oh! and cheap.

Now,I know most of you will say "Go get a bn" I have thought of that,and its most likely what I'll end up getting. I just wanted to see what all my options are.

Edit.
This pleco will be kept with 6-8 Tiger barbs.

Thanks.
Steve.

Oh sorry I forgot that bit,it's done now.

To answer your question,no I dont know what the water is like at my new house.

Steve,

You don't specify where in rainy Ireland you'll live - I think most of the southern parts are pretty chalky and thus hard water areas, so if you're not going to spend lots of money on water softening [and no, the cheap water softeners are no good, because they are designed for keeping kettles and washing machines scale-free, and they just CHANGE the mineral content in the water from something that forms scale to something that doesn't (usually sodium chloride) - and if anything, that's worse for the fish... To remove hardness and not replace it with something else, you need a Reverse Osmosis (RO) or Deionization system.]

So assuming you DON'T have soft water [and don't want to spend â?¬70-100 on water softening equipment], the answer would be that you could have any "brown" bristlenose, but none of the "black" ones - black bristlenoses are strictly soft acidic water.

It's pretty hard to find other alternatives with the limitation in size and must be good algae eater - there's plenty of interesting small pleco's, but many of them are not even touching algae, some of them will eat algae to some extent...

--
Mats