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High tech or low tech

Andy Thurston

Andy Thurston

Member
Joined
16 Apr 2013
Messages
2,811
Hi everyone
I’m curious about everyone’s thoughts on this
What do you all prefer
I know people like @George Farmer generally go the super turbo high tech route
And others like @dw1305 are the super low tech approach.
Myself I love the turbo high tech growth and plant health but it comes with a big price… maintenance and time required to do this.
Low tech is way to slow for me. So I actually prefer adding medium light and co2. Personally I believe the amount of light, co2 and fertiliser you add is similar to putting your foot down in a car
 
Low tech is a better fit for me. The slow pace doesn't bother me, I can still have colorful plants, and a mature low tech tank can gracefully tolerate lot of neglect when life gets busy. I like to keep things simple, and then try to do those things well.

I probably will try CO2 at some point because it seems fun, but I have no plans for it at all right now.
 
I’ve always done low tech I really like low tech plants. One day I may do a rescape and go down the CO2 path - I have a powerful light (Vivid 2) so am unsure if it makes me medium tech 😊

I like the manageable maintenance of low tech but it would be cool to do a proper carpet etc
 
Low tech ! Even though it takes longer for things to grow , you also have more time to head things off if stuff is going downhill . Plus I've got way too many tanks to mess with gas , heavy ferts and massive weekly water changes .
 
For me, it's been about identifying the tipping point at which the hobby has (in the past) actually become a source of stress and worry rather than my finding it de-stressing and relaxing. I think we can all agree that spending money to make yourself more stressed is quite ridiculous. Precisely where that tipping point is, is of course different for everyone:

I think it's also about answering the question, 'What's this aquarium for?' In the past, when I had 8 aquariums of all sorts of different sizes in a 'fish room' which very few people visited from one week to the next. The whole room was a bit of a 'mad professor' fish-keeping lab, with each tank being it's own little adventure, some hi tech, some low-tech, some Walstad, some with Rift lake levels of hardness, some super soft blackwater etc.etc.. The tanks looked OK but the room itself didn't have to look pretty, and it mostly wasn't! Fish-keeping paraphenalia strewn everywhere, happy fish and shrimp breeding profusely and generally thriving. My idea of a small chunk of paradise. The stuff of nightmares for Mrs M.

Then we needed to move house and my whole relationship with the hobby had to be re-thought. These days I have just two tanks in our family living room and their purpose is to combine looking reasonably attractive to family and visitors, while not causing me any stress whatsoever. That mostly means keeping them looking OK with minimal effort. So they're low-tech, fairly heavily planted. They get a 'clean up' and water change about once a month and provide my outdoor goldfish with a regular supply of duckweed to eat. In essence they're 'part of the furniture' and my love of messing about with watery environments has mostly shifted gears to focus on ponds outside: one for wildlife and one (a work in progress) for my shubunkins.
 
I’ve personally never had any experience with high tech tanks, but I love my low tech one. The less I get my hands wet the better. The tank looks beautiful enough for me and I’m not constantly having the faff with it. I do occasionally dabble with the idea of setting up a small high tech tank, but then I see all the costs and time in evolved and go crawling back to my basic, cherry shrimp infested puddle 😅
 
Around the time l joined UKAPS,, after reading alot and seeing Tom Barr aquariums ,pictures of Amano's,reading Amano articles and George Farmer PFK write ups ,l decided to go CO2, I couldn't believe the results from struggling but still decent results before to having a bucket of cuttings, trimmings weekly .. My idea was to have 3 or 4 CO2 set ups but soon kicked that it in the long grass, life, time and cost significant consideration
I started to go low energy and with UKAPS help found my plant selection for this, as well as reading up on fertilisation from Darrel and others and the importance(very) healthy plants to begin with ,nearly all from our sponsers when getting new plants.
Now l only have low energy aquariums but have adopted a way of treating like aa high energy from start, daily water changes of 50% down to 50%weekly= for me less algae and problems,right plants too and regular maintainance ,also only using 3 or 4 easy plants species
Not saying wouldn't have CO2 again but quite happy with low energy
 
For now I'm all about that lowtech, but one day I'd like to try hightech again when I have the time and money to do so. I guess that's my retirement plan !
 
CrazyCory42 said:
I’ve personally never had any experience with high tech tanks, but I love my low tech one. The less I get my hands wet the better. The tank looks beautiful enough for me and I’m not constantly having the faff with it. I do occasionally dabble with the idea of setting up a small high tech tank, but then I see all the costs and time in evolved and go crawling back to my basic, cherry shrimp infested puddle 😅
Click to expand...
That's a possibility a CO2 set up plants only, takes away the danger,is that the right word at least the risk of a accident to fish etc when your not about,,l remember having a 95g aqua one set (discontinued and around 30£at the time)on a 18 ×12××12 growing hairgrass and stems ,l think l missed no fish so it lasted less than a year around 10 months ,
 
Andy Thurston said:
Hi everyone
I’m curious about everyone’s thoughts on this
What do you all prefer
I know people like @George Farmer generally go the super turbo high tech route
And others like @dw1305 are the super low tech approach.
Myself I love the turbo high tech growth and plant health but it comes with a big price… maintenance and time required to do this.
Low tech is way to slow for me. So I actually prefer adding medium light and co2. Personally I believe the amount of light, co2 and fertiliser you add is similar to putting your foot down in a car
Click to expand...
There's also slow with CO2 route, which what I have been doing recently. Coming from very fast high tech setup it is interesting to learn how low you can go with light and watch how the plants you think you know react and the way they grow in a more constrained environment. Especially crypts, some grow like completely different plants.
 
I agree 100% the speed of growth is controlled by light and nutrients. Co2 is also a nutrient. So basically if you keep the nutrients balanced to the light available you can adjust the growth to suit you.
What I was more interested in is where do people prefer to keep their tanks
High tech <====> lowtech is a sliding scale so the question I asked is related to where people sit on this scale
 
I think people see amazing high tech tanks and think I want that so they set up make loads of mistakes and then when they get it right and the tank grows at a ridiculous rate they either abandon cos maintenance is too much or they explore the low tech routes including, like yourself low light with co2.
I’m asking the question to suggest to people who are thinking about abandoning the hobby because of time limits and maintaining high tech can be a problem, that there is another option with amazing results
 
Besides everything else to take in consideration with high tech aquariums the question of " time" is very important. It's never really happened with me but l think it's true ,when things go pear shaped with high tech people do leave the hobby which is a shame
 
Go low. Less is more. It's about choices. Do you want a resource hungry, plant trimming, balance teetering, 'likes' winning, £££s spending, competitive aquascape? Or do you just want the plants to grow, the fish to swim and bask in the quiet satisfaction of it all?
 
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Low tech only for the time being. I was running high tech tanks for a few years however I had mishap where I knocked my regulator and which caused it to massively up my injection rate. I didn’t realise until I saw all my fish gasping and on deaths door. Thankfully I only lost one or two fish.

I keep quite few rare fish species and I’m definitely more into fish than plants so that episode was enough for me to dump the co2. I loved that with co2 I could keep most plant species i wanted and the growth was amazing. However the downside was I always having to work on the tank to keep on top of things. I will definitely go back to it one day but for now I’m enjoying the slower pace.

Cheers
 
I have a high tech tank and a low tech tank. The high tech plants grow extremely fast and I have to regularly prune. It’s a crazy jungle. The low tech is much more interesting as the wee snails, beasties and bugs survive better in there. I think there’s advantages to both but the high tech is out of control now so I may change to “medium tech”.
 
The most lush and beautiful tanks we see around are arguably high tech. Of course, to get there takes a lot more than just putting down the money for the CO2 kit... While there are remarkable low-tech exceptions, the common thread among these tanks are CO2 and a very experienced and talented aquarist - our very own @Courtneybst comes to mind being in that category among others of course. Keeping a high tech tank takes more effort (CO2 dosing, fertilizer, flow etc.) and you need to deal with an additional world of complexities, risks (accidental overdosing CO2 could be lethal for your livestock) and more maintenance - such as pruning, water changes etc. Yes, plants gets super charged with CO2 for sure, and so does algae. If all that is not a deterrence, and you plan to grow plant species that have shown to be very difficult to get to thrive in a low-tech environment, which are not that many - going down the high-tech route might just be worth it for you. Also, UKAPS got a large group of members that are very experienced with CO2 which could make the task of implementing CO2 much easier for you. Personally, I never could check any of the boxes that would encourage me to go high-tech for any of my tanks - if there would be a way to add say 5 ppm of CO2 with little to no effort - akin to adding an air pump - I would opt in. 🙂

Cheers,
Michael
 
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