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The Used-to-be-a-Biotope-Tank

Very sorry to hear all this, Angus. It was as fierce with us last night here in Montrose as I can remember, but being in the town will have helped. We got away with just a garden door blown in. Power browned out momentarily a few times, otherwise ok.
Do you only have coal? Alec's suggestion of floating warmed water bottles makes sense but an open coal fire doesn't make that easy. Wondered if you might have a Calor tank for the house heating.
We have LPG heating, but it needs electricity as well to run, so for the moment, coal fire only.
Yes same here, I don't ever remember a storm like that one.
FWIW we used to have a monster shredder with a Honda which was a devil to start if it had been sitting. We discovered eventually that the problem was if the petrol had been sitting. If you've enough petrol to flush through the carb that might be worth a go, then try again with the freshest petrol you can lay your hands on. I know Hondas are reliable things, but IME can be a bugger to get going.
Above all, just hoping for the best for you and your tank.
It was kept dry over the summer and I put fresh petrol in to start it. It's not even sparking so I'm not sure what the problem is. I cleaned up the spark plug but no effect. Unfortunately the Honda service place 30 miles away is closed due to lack of power!
29 hours now, and we are told next update tomorrow at 10 a.m.
We've done well so far- other fishkeepers nearby without old-fashioned sources of heat have lost all their fish.
 
On to our third day without power, and amazingly temp of tank is still 22 degrees C. I've disconnected the filters and when power comes back on- who knows when- I will tip them out and rinse with tank water before connecting up again.
 
The bad news is we still have no power. The good news is- I managed to get the generator going! Wahoo!
No casualties that I've found yet, and I've spotted an Otocinclus and an Amano shrimp, good signs as they are a bit fragile. Temperature dropped to 20 degrees C, now gradually creeping back up to its nornal 26. Filters smelled foul when I emptied them; hopefully enough live bacteria not to cause an issue over the next couple of days.
 
We got power back on at 11.30 p.m. last night. Yay! Here is the tank, looking no worse for its ordeal. 3 days without light don't seem to have affected the plants, and I haven't noticed any effect on the fish other than a few of them being a bit "darty", which I guess is a sign of them being a bit stressed. You can't see it from the photo, but there are actually over 50 fish in there.

20211129_075329.jpg


@Stan510, the big change between coming back to the hobby nowadays and when I started 50 years ago, is the vast industry which has built up in aquarium "stuff". Back then, the focus was on establishing a "mature" tank, where the plants did most of the work. We didn't do water changes much, didn't add much to the tank (fish did the fertilising) and I ran a successful tank for 20 years that way. Diana Walstad wrote about it and it works. But that kind of system takes a long time to get established and get right. And another change is that "a long time" means a different thing now to what it did back then! Cycling a tank was something that was done on a scale of months, whereas people want to do it in days now. And thinking about it, that's the biggest change- everyone wants to do everything instantly. If I put my grumpy old man hat on, the focus is on make an artificial underwater bonsai forest as quickly as possible, win a prize, tear it down and make another one. It's a different hobby from the one I know and love!
I think the answer is, rather than blindly following instructions alla youtube, I try to take time and effort to watch all the youtubes, read all the websites, and (dare I say it) read all the books, learn about different approaches, and try some of them out, watching and adapting and changing as I go along until things start to go right. For me this has turned out to be somewhere in between the old methods and the new. I'm adding EI ferts and CO2, but water changes are usually only 10 or 20 litres at a time (it's a 140 litre tank) and I'm using R/O water, no tap water. Every few days I harvest some of the plants out and hoover up some of the worst of the mulm, but am not too particular.
 
One week on from getting the power restored, here is an update. As I write we are in the midst of another storm, with 70mph winds outside. Hoping and praying the power doesn't go off again, as I've sent the generator off for servicing! Last week the power was off for a total of just under 57 hours, but the last 20 or so of those I managed to get the generator going, so we had 37 hours of the tank slowly reducing in temperature and the two Fluval G3 filters stagnating.

Unfortunately my previous post saying that the fish and plants all look to be none the worse for wear was a bit premature. There has been a delayed reaction. A couple of days after restoring everything, getting temperature back up to normal, lights back on, and filters back on, fish started to look a bit stressed, darting about. To put you in the picture of the fish community, I have historically kept a few platies in a fairly neutral pH; I've always found them to be robust and good pickers of hair algae and fairly long lived. Latterly I've been aiming at effectively a Rio Negro tetra / cory / oto tank, with softer water, slightly lower pH, tannins, so to start with the platies are not in completely ideal conditions. One of the platies, a heavily pregnant female, took to lying on the bottom of the tank. Another female was looking unhappy with fins clamped; and the dominant male has developed cotton mouth (bacterial infection brought on by stress). The upshot is, I lost the two females a couple of days ago.

I've been testing and testing, and not found anything amiss, with ammonia and nitrites at zero, pH normal, and EC between 200 and 300 microS/cm; temperature back to its normal 26oC. I can only think that the 2 days of darkness, temperature dropping by 6 degrees and (possibly) dead bacteria from the filter causing an ammonia spike that I missed have caused it. Today I noticed a Corydora flashing against plants, and the black widows are very skittish and taking nips out of each other.
Time will tell!

Here is the tank as it looks today. I've adopted a "modified" EI dosing; it is a 140 litre tank, and I take out 10 to 20 litres each day, and replace with RO water, to which I have added the day's fertiliser quota. Then on Sundays I am taking out 30 or 40l, and replacing with RO. I'm taking out a half bucket load of vegetation every couple of days. It is really growing well.
In terms of fish the 10 amano shrimps I put in have vanished, apart from the odd sighting of one of them, despite my efforts to secure the filter intakes and the tank lids. Likewise most of the neons, one or two become visible at feeding time, but mostly stay hidden in the vegetation at the right side, unlike the cardinals which are usually very obvious on the left side. The Otocinclus seem to be surviving well. I've added bogwood with Anubias and Java moss but the moss is not looking too happy; maybe it is too warm for it? Tomorrow, I have another Anubias on wood to add. I am feeding a combination of Aquarian general flake food, and algae wafers, supplemented by the odd pack of Daphnia or bloodworms when I can get them (not often).

aquarium 7-12-21 small.jpg
 
One week on from getting the power restored, here is an update. As I write we are in the midst of another storm, with 70mph winds outside. Hoping and praying the power doesn't go off again, as I've sent the generator off for servicing! Last week the power was off for a total of just under 57 hours, but the last 20 or so of those I managed to get the generator going, so we had 37 hours of the tank slowly reducing in temperature and the two Fluval G3 filters stagnating.

Unfortunately my previous post saying that the fish and plants all look to be none the worse for wear was a bit premature. There has been a delayed reaction. A couple of days after restoring everything, getting temperature back up to normal, lights back on, and filters back on, fish started to look a bit stressed, darting about. To put you in the picture of the fish community, I have historically kept a few platies in a fairly neutral pH; I've always found them to be robust and good pickers of hair algae and fairly long lived. Latterly I've been aiming at effectively a Rio Negro tetra / cory / oto tank, with softer water, slightly lower pH, tannins, so to start with the platies are not in completely ideal conditions. One of the platies, a heavily pregnant female, took to lying on the bottom of the tank. Another female was looking unhappy with fins clamped; and the dominant male has developed cotton mouth (bacterial infection brought on by stress). The upshot is, I lost the two females a couple of days ago.

I've been testing and testing, and not found anything amiss, with ammonia and nitrites at zero, pH normal, and EC between 200 and 300 microS/cm; temperature back to its normal 26oC. I can only think that the 2 days of darkness, temperature dropping by 6 degrees and (possibly) dead bacteria from the filter causing an ammonia spike that I missed have caused it. Today I noticed a Corydora flashing against plants, and the black widows are very skittish and taking nips out of each other.
Time will tell!

Here is the tank as it looks today. I've adopted a "modified" EI dosing; it is a 140 litre tank, and I take out 10 to 20 litres each day, and replace with RO water, to which I have added the day's fertiliser quota. Then on Sundays I am taking out 30 or 40l, and replacing with RO. I'm taking out a half bucket load of vegetation every couple of days. It is really growing well.
In terms of fish the 10 amano shrimps I put in have vanished, apart from the odd sighting of one of them, despite my efforts to secure the filter intakes and the tank lids. Likewise most of the neons, one or two become visible at feeding time, but mostly stay hidden in the vegetation at the right side, unlike the cardinals which are usually very obvious on the left side. The Otocinclus seem to be surviving well. I've added bogwood with Anubias and Java moss but the moss is not looking too happy; maybe it is too warm for it? Tomorrow, I have another Anubias on wood to add. I am feeding a combination of Aquarian general flake food, and algae wafers, supplemented by the odd pack of Daphnia or bloodworms when I can get them (not often).

View attachment 178181
To me the tank and plants look healthy...ts a bit hard to tell as the resolution of the picture is just not high enough. What are the measurements of this tank btw. ? I kind of like the dimensions... just guesstimating from the picture I would say something like 160 x 30 x 30 cm ?

Cheers,
Michael
 
To me the tank and plants look healthy...ts a bit hard to tell as the resolution of the picture is just not high enough. What are the measurements of this tank btw. ? I kind of like the dimensions... just guesstimating from the picture I would say something like 160 x 30 x 30 cm ?

Cheers,
Michael
Yes, correct, a little deeper than that top to bottom as there are a couple of inches of substrate hidden. But yes water volume a liitle more than 5 cubic feet.
Plants do look healthy apart from the moss which is brown. It is quite new (3 weeks) so I'll give it a bit more time.
 
Here are a few pics of the residents. Left to right- cardinals, glowlights and Otocinclus; Otocinclus; Corydora giving me the eye; black widow tetras; neon; Otocinclus.

fish small.jpg
 
And thinking about it, that's the biggest change- everyone wants to do everything instantly. If I put my grumpy old man hat on, the focus is on make an artificial underwater bonsai forest as quickly as possible, win a prize, tear it down and make another one. It's a different hobby from the one I know and love!
I love that summary. Artificial bonsai, fake mountains with boring pastures, it's all so bland and boring I fully understand their need to tear it down after a few months. No mystery, no having to search for a glimpse of that fish you know is hiding somewhere, nose pressed to the glass to see the back of its dorsal fin reflected off the side of the glass to know its still there. I much prefer the tanks that look like actual aquatic nature. I am a co2 user simply because it allows me to keep a few plants more easily, but my scapes tend to stay for years.
 
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A pair of stockings for my fish.
The latest addition to the tank, courtesy of my daughter and her sewing machine, are these stockings for the filter intakes, to prevent shrimps or fry going in there. The material is the stretchy stuff sold for wrapping joints of meat. Works a treat!
I have loads more of the material left if anybody wants some, pm me your address.
p.s. sorry for the state of the glass, I should have cleaned it before taking the photo.

20211210_134744.jpg
 
A pair of stockings for my fish.
The latest addition to the tank, courtesy of my daughter and her sewing machine, are these stockings for the filter intakes, to prevent shrimps or fry going in there. The material is the stretchy stuff sold for wrapping joints of meat. Works a treat!
I have loads more of the material left if anybody wants some, pm me your address.
p.s. sorry for the state of the glass, I should have cleaned it before taking the photo.

View attachment 178290
That's pretty clever, won't it decay after a while?
 
I lost a neon tetra yesterday. It commited Hara-kiri by jumping / swimming through the air lock into a drop-checker and bathing itself in pH indicator solution. I don't know how it managed it. Very strange.
 
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