General Care Discussion :: Request General Care Suggestions

[pariah]

GAH!!! I'm getting so irritated!

Okay, so I went out yesterday and had a Mitchell shopping spree. I bought him a suction cup soap dish from Wal-Mart...which is huge because I have boycotted Wa-Mart but they were the only place I could find it.
I bought a Flukers 5.5" lamp and a 5% UVB bulb (I wanted 10 because I have a screen top but Petsmart was out and PetCo apparently doesn't have squat.)
I also bought some fake duckweed because Mitchell seems to like to play in his lettuce leaves.

I get home and the first thing I do is drop and shatter the bulb. Luckily Petsmart bought my story that it came that way. Second thing I did (when I got back from Petsmart again) was install the soap dish. Perfect! He loves it! He slept on it last night with a rock pillow. Great idea to whomever invented this!

Next I put in the duck weed and he loved it. It played with it for a long time while I watched to make sure he wouldn't eat it. He nipped it a few times, but he does that with everything so I thought I was safe. This morning though, it was one big wad stuck to the filter. Grr.

But the real kicker was when I turned on the Flukers lamp with the UVB bulb and it didn't come on.
The lamp is rated to 75w and the bulb is 26w. What the hell?

Does anyone know what I did wrong? Or did I just get a crappy bulb?

[untsmurf]

Try weighting down the plants, to prevent them from being sucked into the filter.

I would test the hood lamp with a regular bulb that you know works to see if it's the bulb or the lamp. Plus, make sure that everything is screwed in and turned on (we've made that mistake multiple times).

[pariah]

Yep, that's the first thing I did. It's for sure the bulb.

And the plants are duckweed, which float so weighing the down isn't gonna work. I just didn't think they would get sucked into the filter.

[untsmurf]

Oh, sorry I didn't recognize the plant off hand, but I just looked it up. It looks like the plant is supposed to float on the surface of the water. I've never dealt with that particular plant. We have fake lillipads, but they've never been sucked in. If the it's the bulb, you can take it back to the store and get it replaced.