Easystreet
Member
- Joined
- 13 Jan 2012
- Messages
- 56
Hey all,
Been lurking on here for ages but short of a few early question haven't been that active.
Anyway would like to document my progress with my large low tech attempt. Been a lot of fun and very happy with end result but it requires a lot of patience!!
I had originally planned to make this a Indonesian biotope type tank but cost and ease meant I decided to use more readily available species. So it's ended up as a fairly standard community aquarium. The tank originally housed an Oscar but after 8 years he passed. So I decided to keep things that wouldn't rip all vegetation to shreds!
It's got a custom background made out of foam epoxy and silver sand with a built in overflow to hide equipment and inlets for the filters:
Found some wood on a walk. Soaked it, scrubbed it...scrubbed it some more... added it and watched carefully. Short of some early tannins I've had no problem:
Some trial and error with clearly non-aquatic plants from my LFS and some vallis and some anubias. But eventually I got a pack of cheap assorted crypts (not very many) and things settled in and started growing.... owe so slowly... but they started.
Early planting:
After some of the non-aquatics died back!!
With some more crypts:
It's now been up and running for aroun 10 months. I've done one uproot and replant to sort the scape out a bit and that's it. Apart from weekly 50% water changes it's sooo low maintenance! It looks like this now:
Sorry, I can't take a good photo to save my life! It looks much better in real life! It also turns out I may be the only person in the world who can't grow vallis very well!!
Just brought some floaters for it this week. Amazon frogbit. They are already growing quickly. Will be interesting to see what the growth rate is like on a plant that isn't CO2 limited.
Here's a vid (I can't take video's either!! ). Half way through the main lights go off to leave just the 54w T8.
http://vid272.photobucket.com/albums/jj193/Kerr1586/IMG_1615.mp4
Specs:
Light: 1x 54W old vieweing light on 08:00-22:00, 1x 80watt very bright LED light on 15:00-21:00.
Filtration: Two externals.
CO2: Nothing added.
Ferts: Recently started adding half measures of EI ferts but not sure if this has made any difference at all. I may stop.
Fish: 4 assorted angels, 1 pair of kribs, 1 dutch ram, 5 kuhli loaches, 6 albino corydoras, 4-5 ottos, 5 amano shrimp, 20 harlequin rasboras, 4 SAE. Some baby kribs.
Thanks,
Jim
Been lurking on here for ages but short of a few early question haven't been that active.
Anyway would like to document my progress with my large low tech attempt. Been a lot of fun and very happy with end result but it requires a lot of patience!!
I had originally planned to make this a Indonesian biotope type tank but cost and ease meant I decided to use more readily available species. So it's ended up as a fairly standard community aquarium. The tank originally housed an Oscar but after 8 years he passed. So I decided to keep things that wouldn't rip all vegetation to shreds!
It's got a custom background made out of foam epoxy and silver sand with a built in overflow to hide equipment and inlets for the filters:
Found some wood on a walk. Soaked it, scrubbed it...scrubbed it some more... added it and watched carefully. Short of some early tannins I've had no problem:
Some trial and error with clearly non-aquatic plants from my LFS and some vallis and some anubias. But eventually I got a pack of cheap assorted crypts (not very many) and things settled in and started growing.... owe so slowly... but they started.
Early planting:
After some of the non-aquatics died back!!
With some more crypts:
It's now been up and running for aroun 10 months. I've done one uproot and replant to sort the scape out a bit and that's it. Apart from weekly 50% water changes it's sooo low maintenance! It looks like this now:
Sorry, I can't take a good photo to save my life! It looks much better in real life! It also turns out I may be the only person in the world who can't grow vallis very well!!
Just brought some floaters for it this week. Amazon frogbit. They are already growing quickly. Will be interesting to see what the growth rate is like on a plant that isn't CO2 limited.
Here's a vid (I can't take video's either!! ). Half way through the main lights go off to leave just the 54w T8.
http://vid272.photobucket.com/albums/jj193/Kerr1586/IMG_1615.mp4
Specs:
Light: 1x 54W old vieweing light on 08:00-22:00, 1x 80watt very bright LED light on 15:00-21:00.
Filtration: Two externals.
CO2: Nothing added.
Ferts: Recently started adding half measures of EI ferts but not sure if this has made any difference at all. I may stop.
Fish: 4 assorted angels, 1 pair of kribs, 1 dutch ram, 5 kuhli loaches, 6 albino corydoras, 4-5 ottos, 5 amano shrimp, 20 harlequin rasboras, 4 SAE. Some baby kribs.
Thanks,
Jim