Tank got a large trim and cleaning today. Ill snap fresh pictures tomorrow, the lights are off now
🙂
I have had a fair bit of Sera Siporax biomedia lying at the feet of the plants up against the back wall, to provide shelter for newborn fry and shrimp. Last time I disturbed the piles there wasnt much mulm and crud there, only a few bits of bark from the wood and other sorts of dark things that no one likes to eat or break down. But when I disturbed the piles again today there was a -lot- of mulm and brown gunk and crud that didnt look very good. Since im trying to get the upper hand on algae, i decided to take the siporax out for now, and did a good vaccuum of the sand to get all the crap out. This way the corys can snuffle the sand there and help waft things up so it gets drawn towards the filter where I can remove it regularly.
The big thicket of Heteranthera zosterifolia was starving its lower parts for light and it was shedding leaves all over the tank. I had let the plant get too scraggly really. Need to throw away the bottoms and replant the tops more regularly. It wasnt too long ago I snipped the growing tops, so I didnt have a lot of healthy length to replant, hence it ended up a bit short. But hopefully it grows back quickly.
Almost the same for Limnophila sessiliflora, except here the lower leaves were doing better. I switched the placement of these two plants around. Im trying to not have very similar leaf shapes next to each other, as I think the contrast looks nice. H. z. was looking a bit too similar to the Hygrophila difformis in the back left corner.
Hygrophila costata ('angustifolia') in the back right corner also got topped and replanted. I was fishing out siporax from between the stems and realised the lower parts were pretty bare. At least im the one who has done it
Ive been pinching off the dying or algae infested leaves, instead of letting it shed all over the tank like the H. z.
To be fair to myself its a lot easier to isolate and pinch off a leaf from this big plant relative to the tiny fine leaved ones
😵
Because these three plants were the biggest in the tank, a fair bit of plant matter was removed.
I will monitor the water quality carefully for a while. I feel bad about removing so much, but I try to tell myself that it would be better to have smaller healthy plants regrowing than a bunch of decaying leaves and unhappy stems rotting.
Ive been changing 50% of the water every day as a result of my earlier filter shenanigans, so that part is already sorted. And since I kicked up so much crud I changed about 75-80% today.
Ive been kinda stubborn about filling water right from the tap until now, but this week I finally came around and bought a used 200 liter barrel to age my water in. The plastic is food grade, and it has not had "chemicals" in it according to the seller. It has however, had lemon juice / lemon extract in it
Its been given a good scrub without soap and refilled and emptied a bunch of times, but I think the aroma of the lemon juice has gotten into the plastic because it constantly smells faintly of lemon in there
The scent is a little bit alarming, but it was "all natural" lemon extract, so the worst that should happen if there were remnants in the barrel, would be that the water got a bit acidic. Or so I hope.
Ive tested the TDS and the PH and everything is as you would expect.
The water itself doesnt smell, just the barrel
So now I can change as much water as quickly as I like without worrying about TDS, PH, GH changes etc.
Before now I have been dosing Prime to the total volume of my tank, and letting it circulate for a little bit before refilling from the tap. But always in the back of my head is the worry that the chlorine has not found the Prime before it finds the gills of the fish. Not a nice thought. But now its all pre-mixed and even aerated.
We have been assuming my tap has a lot of CO2, based on the many bubbles that form in the tank when ive been changing water. But is it possible that its a different gas? Or maybe a different cause?
I did some testing last week and the PH of my fresh tap water is 7,3. I filled a bucket and let it just stand over night, tapped the bucket to get the bubbles to release from the bucket wall and tested once it settled. It came out to PH 7,1. So the PH went down after degassing, not up as I would have thought if the tap had a lot of CO2 mixed in..? Or am I misunderstanding something here?
I experimented last week with turning my filter's spray bar spraying into the back wall during water changes from the tap, and saw a significant decrease in bubbles. So might all the bubbles that got stuck on fish, shrimp and plants have been just tiny air bubbles made from the agitation from the spray bar?
Maybe its been an unintentional red herring all along.
Sorry for the long post with no pictures, I promise to make it up to you tomorrow
😀
Only four hours or so had passed.
/end rant
I want to reduce the total amount of filter media in my filter to make sure flow through and oxygenation is maximised. Obviously, I cant do all of these filter shenanigans in one go, which is a problem because thats how I like to do things, way too much at once 
I think I disturbed too much of the media this time and am now paying for it in daily waterchanges 
