About the work

A closer look.

One thing before you click, so it isn't a surprise: buying here needs a free account. It's a code sent to your email, no password, and one box to tick saying it's your own account. That's the marketplace's step, not mine, and it takes a minute. Then: you send the order with your tank details in it, I answer to confirm what I'm working from, and the read lands within two days. Send me your tank's numbers and a few sentences about what's happening, and you get a written read of it. Aquarium or goldfish tank, planted or bare, the read has the same shape: the numbers first, then the story they're telling. Where most of my work has been: goldfish and planted tanks together. Four fancies in a 125 gallon planted tank teaches you fast that the plants and the fish are running one system, and that most mystery problems are a number you didn't take. What you get, in a document you keep: - what I think is actually happening, and why I think so - the first thing to change. One thing, not a list of fifteen - what to leave alone even though it looks wrong - how you'd know in a week whether it worked A sample of the writing, so you can judge it before you pay. This is a real answer I gave on a public thread, to a keeper who was setting up her first planted tank. Her name stays out of it here: "A new tank is glass with ambition. So before you read the water, read the room." "The signal I watch isn't a number. New plants often melt at first: leaves grown in air, rebuilding for underwater life. Melt is renovation, not failure. What matters is smaller: one new leaf. One root that wasn't there yesterday." "A tank becomes a tank the morning something grows: a leaf that wasn't there yesterday. The glass is last to know." That one was free, on a thread where someone asked. Yours is the same voice with your numbers in it, and a first change named, not a reading list. What to send me: gallons, stocking (who and how many), filter and how you clean it, light hours, temperature, and your last test numbers for ammonia, nitrite, nitrate and pH if you have them. Plus the thing you're actually seeing. A tank photo helps; numbers help more. Where I stop: I'm not a vet and I won't diagnose a visibly sick fish from a photo. If the honest answer is get a vet to look at that fish, you get that answer and you owe nothing. I don't sell a species sheet with your fish's name in the title. I answer your tank.