Why do we do this?

[Izzy and Tim]

Hello to all of the wonderful people on this forum. It has been a most useful resource for myself (Tim) and my ten year old daughter (Izzy) for the past few years.
From the top:
Izzy's mum and I started to think about getting a fish seveal years ago for Izzy as she desperately wanted a pet. Fair enough I thought- Tank, Water, Fish. job done!
The internet is a terrible thing for an obsessive personality such as myself...
I'm sure it will be to the relief of everyone reading this that I did some research before getting anything, which led me to proper aquaria, planted tanks, iwagumi, stocking levels, dosing regimes, lighting levels, water changes... This was not as straight forward as we had assumed.
However I fell in love with the tanks of Amano, George farmer, Pasquale Buonpane and more and knew that Izzy would too, so armed with (half) the required knowledge, no experience, a shoe-string budget and a healthy dash of arrogance we presented Izzy with an 80 litre (600x300x450) tank, filter and light. She was most enthusiastic and interested in the science behind it all so together we came up with a plan- filled it with cat litter, rocks, plants, moss and water. Stuck some DIY lights on top an external Eheim beside and If I do say so- created something pleasant.
We cycled it then added eight White clouds and a few cherry and Amano shrimp.
A month later it was a box full of brown algal sludge.🙁
Research suggested various thing and we tried it all including introducing snails. As many people suggested- the algae disappeared for no particular reason a month or so later.
For a few moths we had a most acceptable tank. The fish spawned and suddenly we had around thirty😵. The shrimp all grew and the plants and moss thrived.
Then some spirogyra arrived...
We have spent far too much time in the past couple of years pulling out clods of algae. We tried black outs, water changes, stopping ferts, increasing ferts, liquid CO2. I literally started having nightmares about algae and dying strangulated fish. Izzy's enthusiasm waned and things went from bad to worse.
Then about a year ago we were offered, for free, a 450l tank with stand filter lighting etc. (Juwel Rio400 setup)
Needless to say, we did not jump at the opportunity. The prospect of going from an 80L algae farm to a 450L algae farm was not too enticing. But how often does a chance like that come up?
So after much discussion we decided it was an opportunity to do things right, back to basics, find out the mistakes of last time and give the fish the home they've longed for.
The fist thing I realised after looking at how to set up the new tank was that the lighting on the old tank was WAY OTT, like off the chart on every reliable chart I could find. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I just aimed at high light on the old WPG rule, but with high output spiral CFLs in an almost perfect conical reflector.😱😎
'That might have been part of the problem then' I thought.
Unfortunately circumstances are never perfect, and the enormous new tank sat empty in our living room looking intimidating for months with the green cesspool that was the old one beside it, before my better half put her foot down and said it had to be sorted.
So the set up and settle down of the new tank was a little bodged (admittedly, with a far better understanding of what we were doing than before).
It is this new tank that we now need help with...





I shall be starting a thread on the new tank and all input will be gratefully received!

 

[PARAGUAY]

Hi Welcome to the forum,looking forward to the thread

 

[Edvet]

Hey Izzy, Tim ans Izzy's mum. Welcome@Ukaps.
For the best help we like pictures, these help us seeing what the situation is.
In your situation i would realy advise to start with a low tech/low energy tank. (even though we can discuss what this is for days on this forum). This means not to much light ( i will explain later) and easy plants.
This is all a personal view but a lot of people will agree with this. There are tutorials and even a whole section devoted on the low tech angle. Basically this will allow you to have a great looking tank, only at a slower speed, with far less maintenance, compared to the high energy/high light tanks. My analogy: if you learn to drive you start in a "reasonably priced car", not in a Bugatti veyron.

Light:
for this approach go with T8 or T5 fluorescent tubes, amount and height above the substrate dictate the light levels.

This graph is often used to guesstimate the amount of light we use ( you could use an actual PAR meter, but these are expensive). My advise: stay in the low levels. If your tank comes equiped with to much light to stay low, use less tubes, or block part of the tubes with some tin foil .

Substrate:

There are about 6 million substrates you could use, from "dirt cheap" to Bugatti prices. My personal preference is a natural substrate like course river sand. Nowadays more and more people are using soil under the substrate, (nice tutorial by member Troi on this : http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/the-soil-substrate-or-dirted-planted-tank-a-how-to-guide.18943/), plants can grow in a lot of substrates, fertilising them through the watercolumn (puting ferts in the water, not in the ground) is very feasible.

Water:

The quality of your available water is important in two ways: 1) additives can harm fish and plants and 2) very hard or soft water might influence things. Ask for waterparameters from your watercompany and we can give our input. But: most plants can grow in most waters, and so can a lot of fish. You can do some waterchanges depending on the amount of fish and fertilising levels.

Ferts:

Plants need to eat to grow. Some have invented : the estimative index, a fancy way of providing of plenty of everything, so there are as little as possible limiting factors. (liebig's law applies here
) There is plenty of evidence to much ferts don't cause algea. Even though there are a lot of people ( firms and aquarists) who will tell too much this or that ( nitrates, phosphates etc) will cause algea, the general consensus on this forum is: it doesn't!! (a lot of this stems from observations in nature to much ferts wil cause algea in wastewater situations, but this can't and shouldn't be translated to out aquarium situation).
MY advise for a low tech setup is: feed but do about 1/10 -1/4 of EI strength.

Plants:

Look at the Tropica "easy"range for starting a low tech setup. Plant heavily, use some floaters to gauge fertilising ("invented by member Darrel: http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/duckweed-index-ferts-advice.21003/) and/or to block some light

Filtering:

Use good quality cannister filters, don't overpack them with fancy filter media, your plants will do the most of the filtering, the filter needs to move the water around a bit ( for a low tech setup 3 times the volume of the tank per hour should do) and give some surface ripple to aid in the gasexchange in the tank.

Inspiration: there are some briljant examples of low tech setups in our "featured' section. Most wellknown are : http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/a-chocolate-puddle.21327/, http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/toms-bucket-o-mud-the-end.14521/

 

[Izzy and Tim]

Many thanks to both for replies.
Photo's are on the way, just need to catch a time that I am in the house, the tank lights are on and I can find the camera. As soon as it happens I'll get the thread up and running.
Edvet, You may well be right about the lowtech being the best option for us. unfortunately I didn't really consider this before setting the new tank up and we are well past that now as you will see.

I actually watched a most interesting video recently on Liebig's Law of the Minimum vs. Multiple Limitation Hypothesis.
If you've not seen it before it's HERE
If you can't be bothered to watch- he is saying that in many cases - given sufficient nutrients but limited on one, a plant will adapt to increase it's uptake of the limiting nutrient until it reaches the next limitation. (Multiple limitation hypothesis)
Interesting stuff. It may start to explain what I have not managed to get my head around since the start and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this.

Common wisdom holds:
Algal nutrient uptake can happen at much lower levels than plants. This means that you can't starve your tank to get rid of algae.

me: Fair enough.​

Large and healthy plant mass in the tank is good for combating algae.

me: Erm, OK. Seems to be the case looking around successful tanks on the internet (Hardly a scientific deduction on my part)​

This happens by the plants 'out-competing' the algae for nutrients

me: 😵 ...does that not conflict with the first point? Surely they would have to out-compete each other before starting to compete with the algae?
​

I've never really understood it. I had a theory that, with large water changes, the more complex life-forms (plants) could store nutrients and keep absorbing from the soil when the water nutrient levels dropped severely. As the simple structured algae could not do this it needs constant conditions to flourish, so fluctuating conditions would favour the plants.
However, almost everything I read about algae says it is caused / made worse by fluctuations. And EI dosing has you adding ferts back in immediately after a water change giving no gap to starve the algae.

Acoording to MLH though- with a some nutrients being on the lean side, the plants can adapt their structures (maybe even biochemistry?) to glean as much as possible so long as they have a slight excess of other nutrients. This keeps these few nutrients at very low levels in the tank and the water changes ensure they cannot build up too much.
This would only work if the plant responded to the specific nutrient limitations according to MLH not Liebig's. It would seem the response varies for different nutrients (and maybe different plants) so without a greater understanding the results would be a little hit and miss. It also depends on algae being unable to exhibit MLH behaviour, which does seem a reasonable assumption. Also complicating matters is that any plant's MLH adaption to a specific nutrient deficiency is likely to take time, and that time will vary depending on the plant and the nutrient.



This is probably not the place for this discussion. Maybe all this has already been answered somewhere, even on this forum! I get lost with all the research.😕

Our current setup has more basic problems than this anyway, so I'll get that thread started first.

 

[Edvet]

Best way to look at it is: algae are predators, they prey on the weak. Healthy strong plants fend them off, weak damaged plants are eaten.

Liebig's law is oversimplified, but gives a general idea. On of the biggest problems in this hobbie is people are partially interpretting facts originating in other areas ( wastewater technology, planthealth, growing crops etc etc) and incorporating them in the aquarium. Commercial firms using generalised ideas to stimulate their sales, or downright misinforming the public for their own benefit. And subsequently all these ideas are spread in the hobby community.
This forum is generally a healthy group of people, where most ideas can be discussed, and we have gotten rid of some of the misconceptions this hobby is riddled with.

 

[G H Nelson]

Hi welcome to the ukaps gang!
What a great introduction
All the best
hoggie