Asian Cube 20L

[ourmanflint]

Hey Darrel

interesting read! I did prewash my cat litter in london tap water so yes pretty hard stuff, so depending on the adsorption capacity, a fair percentage of the adsorption sites would have already been filled by Ca2+ I would imagine. I wonder if the red colour of the cat litter is also due to high ferric oxide content. My prewashing the JI and adding a few Alder cones to tank was done as you say to dissolve any limestone present. I did a 50% water change with rainwater from allotment yesterday to reduce any hardness present (haven't even tested GH or kH yet though).
So long as the Dragon stone remains inert and I add some peat to filter, I can't really foresee any huge upswings in kH or pH. I am aiming for pH 6 to start with and may drop to pH 5.5 over a period of weeks and months. I don't particularly want to go lower than that and Paro's should be adaptable to that anyway. If I do see upswings though I guess I will either have to change my approach or change fish.

Cheers
Rod

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,

So long as the Dragon stone remains inert and I add some peat to filter, I can't really foresee any huge upswings in kH or pH. I am aiming for pH 6 to start with and may drop to pH 5.5 over a period of weeks and months. I don't particularly want to go lower than that.

I'd be quite surprised if you can get the water below pH7, once the dGH and dKH are present they will buffer the water pretty effectively. Because pH isn't a very useful parameter in very soft water I usually just measure conductivity in these sort of tanks, and aim for lower than 100micros (~60 ppm TDS).

Cheers Darrel

 

[ourmanflint]

Tank seems to be cycled now and parameters as of today are

PH 7.0
dKh 90ppm
GH 160ppm

Not perfect for keeping Paro's but not too bad. I will do a weekly 30% water change with rain water for the next few weeks and see how parameters change.

 

[ourmanflint]

bit of an update..

I think the tank is now finished, the fish are in and I'm pretty happy with the way it looks.

I now have 6 Pseudomugil gertrudae and 5 Parosphromenus nagyi "cherating", although it can take ages to find one sometimes even in a tank so small. I've got a 40cm cube on the way so will wait until I get a nice pair of Paros (they're still pretty young and small) then leave a single pair in here and move the others on.
Parameters pH 7.0 (unchanged over past couple of weeks), GH 120 ppm, kH 50ppm I'm guessing either the peat pellets I have added to filter is having an effect on hardness or my booming Physa snail population is the culprit.

Plant list:
cryptocoryne moehlmannii
C. wendtii "tropica"?
C. lucens
C. cordata var blassii
C. albida (costata)
Hygrophila corymbosa siamensis
Limnophila aromatica
Eleocharis acicularis
Vesicularia montagnei ‘Christmas’
Bucephalandra sp. sekadau 1
Bucephalandra lamandau


cheers

Rod

 

[Edvet]

Looks great and good fish selection, grats!

 

[tim]

Lovely rod, look forward to the journal for the 40.

 

[ourmanflint]

How about a 2 1/2 year update?

Tank is still here, I don't do very much to it, just top up with fresh RO when needed & that is it. Plants are doing well, though growing quite slowly. Still a lot of algae of different sorts but have given up trying to get rid of it.

It's as low maintenance as I can make it