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200l planted tank. A gentle return to keeping fish.

MartinP

New Member
Joined
22 May 2019
Messages
13
Location
Lewes, Sussex
So, after walking my kids to school, conversation turned to getting pets. I managed to talk them away from anything furry and talk turned to a fish tank I had when my son was 5 and my daughter was a baby. My son loved it and had fun remembering all of the various inhabitants which he had named. That tank was a 65l tall hexagon tank, so I soon realised that I was so restricted to what I could house. Even though I had upgraded my filters to Eheim external, I always yearned for something bigger.
Anyway, after the school run, I got to thinking about another tank, so ended up online to check out what was available on eBay. I started looking at Eheim filters as a starting point and whiled away a few hours when I should probably have been doing something more important!
One auction jumped out at me, it was a full set of tank, filter(s) and everything needed. The only problem was that it had a “buy it now” price that was more than I had wanted to pay. But 15 people were already watching it, so it could have disappeared at any time!
It was for a ND custom built 200l tank (80x48x50cm) Eheim 2217 external, Eheim Biopower 200 internal, a ton of Eheim filter media and all sorts of peripheral stuff to finish off. But it was 50 miles away and I don’t have a car. After a lot of umming and ahhing and talking to friends, I hit the “buy it now” button!

Fast forward a week and I now had a decent sized (compared to my last one) tank in my front room!

More to follow. Including pics.

Martin
 
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Sorting out position in the room was tricky. It’s south facing, so didn’t want it next to the window.only place was on the far wall and to use the curtains at certain times of the day.
 
So, I now had a tank. And absolutely no idea what I was going to stock it with! So on with the research. I knew that it was going to be real plants (obvs) but the priority was shifting away from being fish based. I didn’t want big individuals, I was going to have a small shoal. And heavily planted to give them lots of hidey holes.

One thing that has definitely changed in the last ten years, is the amount of online information. It’s overwhelming.
The availability of information and shops supplying everything possible was amazing! Even researching the substrate took me ages.
I’m a fan of natural looking tanks, so the kids were upset that they couldn’t have a spongebob squarepants pineapple in my tank. So, I took myself off to a couple of fish shops looking for inspiration and returned home with a large pice of bogwood as a centrepiece. That went in a bucket to soak for a week or two whilst I decided what substrate I needed for my plants. An order for Seachem black sand was placed and a plant selection from aquarium gardens soon followed.
 
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A very healthy selection of plants arrived from Aquarium Gardens arrived. I spent a good few hours separating them into their smaller plantlets.

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Even after rinsing the black sand, a very milky tank was the result for a few days.

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Now the tank has been planted, I’m carrying out weekly 50% water changes whilst the tank has been cycling. It gives me time to plan for the inhabitants and to get the plants settled and growing.


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A water change was carried out to enable planting.

Martin
 
Be careful you dont see an increase in nitrates with the recommended dosage... normally ok but you may want to tweak back a bit if they rise too much between water changes :)
 
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