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Reborn

viktorlantos

viktorlantos

Aquascaper
Joined
25 Oct 2008
Messages
1,598
Location
Budapest, Hungary
This one is also probably missing from the journal section.

The past story was that i had an Asian Spirit scape / which is still in contest at IAPLC 2012 ;)

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It was a nice but pretty challenging scape to keep it nice on a long term. Also with a baby girl and an aquascaping gallery i wanted some minimal maintenance tank for the next 6 months or so.

After removed all the plants, wood pieces. Added in some new stones and a bag of freesh Amazonia in the back

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Yes i kept the rocks with Algae did not brushed it. I have that's why i am paying for CO2 to do the job :lol:
Nah joking, but i thought in a well balanced tank these algae will go away in the first few weeks.

And i was right. After 2.5 weeks the tank looked like this. Nothing happened just changed the water after the planting

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And this is where we are today (well last weekend :D )

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I only had to trimming once in this timeframe. Sorry for the algae glass stuff, but this shot was before the maintenance work.

I am using RO water only for water changes. 125 liters per week. The water hardness is kicking back after 4 days so that's the only challenging part in this scape. But otherwise a lovely background in our living room. And my doughter love it ;)

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I also did a video last weekend on this tank. Not bad after 9 weeks with some challenging stuff.



The thing that i like in this scape that i fully reused the base of the previous scape. Just changed the plants and i have a completely new aquarium which not need maintenance.

Thanks for watching guys. Your comments are welcome :thumbup:
 
foxfish said:
Hi Victor, lovely tank.
You seem to have two lily pipes? What is the brown orange object in the right corner?
Click to expand...

Yup i have 2 x Eheim Prof 2075 running under this tank one of them push the CO2 with an AM1000 CO2 reactor.
So 2 inlet 2 outlet glass.

The orange stuff is an ADA Softenizer. I am using this Softenizer and another resin in one of the filter to slow down the hardening along the week, but they are not enough for this much stone and water. Forget to remove it by the photo session.

The water hardness is fluctuating a lot. AT water change around TDS 80 ppm 4 days later 280ppm which is very close to our tap water.

Very interesting to see and inspect several things in the life of this aquarium.
The previous scape was lack on flow. Because of that BGA algae was a continous guest there.
Same soils same decor same filter but with the new scape this algae never appeared. So this was purely a flow issue before.

The thing what i mentioned in my other post in another topic a few days ago is the plant stress.
If you only see the last image the plant looks ok. They are green they filled in the scape. However i also see that plants regenerate slowly after trimming. Grows slower. And HC is strugling and not as dense as we usually have in our planted tanks in the gallery.

I am pretty sure the changing hardness put a lot of stress on the plants and i have continous biofilm and scum on the sufrace because of that.

Still the scape will look pretty nice after a month or so when it reach its final form, but life would be so much easier and the plant quality would be much better with a decor stone which isn't hardening that much.
 
Hi Victor,
I am using a lot of seiryu stone in my tank and am noticing even within the two day period between water changes (new set up) that the TDS is rising dramatically. You say that TDS varies from 80 at water change to 280 4 days later, how high do you think it would get, would it reach a level and then stabilise or would it just carry on hardening indefinitely? My tap water which i use for water changes is very soft naturally (around 80ppm TDS), I'm just wondering whether to fight it or just buffer my water change water nearer the tank water to reduce the huge fluctuations you talk about which are effecting the growth of your plants? Obviously if it is going to harden to rift valley or marine fish territory then it's a no go, but within reason I could choose fish appropriately.
As a side I noted from another of your recent posts that you use lower temperatures but also suggest that TDS of 120ppm (or was it 140ppm?) optimises plant health, is this why you use ro water and are fighting against the hardness of this tank as opposed to just using your tap water?
Thanks for any thoughts on this
Ady
 
I do not know how high it would get, but 280 is already too close to my tapwater 330 which is 14 KH/GH. I would do more water changes but time is limited. Probably with 2 water change within a week would cause a bit less change.

I have like 40-60Kg of Seiryu stone in this setup for 223 L.

I was on tap water before, and even in that time i used similar equipments CO2 injections etc. Seen less problems as the water was stable.

However with this stone it does not matter you go in with harder or softer water as hard water would be even harder.
We know it's a badass stone, but looks soo nice, hard to replace to something else ;)

Yup in the past 2 years we mainly worked with soft water low temp tanks. And the result is amazing. I know people who are on tap water say they can grow anything and no need soft water, but i am on the opposite side. And it is clearly visible how the same plant looks like in soft and a bit colder water than tap and colder or tap and warmer water.

All the mosses, stems, carpeting plants enjoys this what we're using. It's not only because of the water quality, but probably they get more light enough CO2 and we're not lazy with maintenance tasks.

I had harder times to keep the water temp at 22-23 at home because of a baby at summer time, but that's what i usually target. The reason why i use minerals to fix TDS because of it easiness. I just check with a TDS Pen and does not matter if it is a seiryi tank or a full soft water tank i get the result right away. Know that i need 1 or more spoon to target 120 approx where we're in safe. Mixing with tap water would be a little harder as i had to measure it for every single tank.

I marked this in another topic before if the TDS is too small there will be problems with algae and because we keep shrimps too there will be molting problems with CRS.

Anyway these are minor things, but sometimes a lot of these minor things adds the little extra to the success.

I have to add that we're using larger capacity RO unit to save on waste water and produce water quicker. In our store we're using a 130L/hr unit. At home i have a 60L/hr unit. Both with booster pumps and multiple membranes.
 
Hey Viktor, another awesome scape. So very simple yet it looks like a vast landscape :) What is the brown thing behind the glass intake on the right side of the tank please ?
 
Antipofish said:
Hey Viktor, another awesome scape. So very simple yet it looks like a vast landscape :) What is the brown thing behind the glass intake on the right side of the tank please ?
Click to expand...


Cheers :thumbup:

The orange stuff is an ADA Softenizer. I am using this Softenizer and another resin in one of the filter to slow down the hardening along the week, but they are not enough for this much stone and water. Forget to remove it by the photo session.
Click to expand...

We used it in a smaller tank in our gallery and there it worked well however in this size it's only lowered the hardness in a 180L tank 2-4 degrees. We did not had stones there so maybe this was the reason.
 
Hi, I'm new here, and I'm just discovering the way you're making aquascape, and I feel it awsome! :thumbup:
In that kind of mountain scape, maybe thiny rocks on the back (and top) of the tank will make an impression of depth (I don't know if the word is correct, I found it in a translater)
 
Cheers guys. :D
I am not posted a while ago. Things are a bit busy around us these days.

However today i had a little time for some maintenance task on this tank and i made a photo at the end of the day.
The tank is 4 month old here. I am not happy with all the plants and their conditions, for example the HC much weaker than we usually have in our gallery, but it's green at least and ran all over the tank :D Maybe this type of form fits better to this wild scene.

Will do a trimming sometimes in the following weeks and will shoot the contest photo on this tank too. Allright here it is...

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Reborn @4 month by viktorlantos, on Flickr

At the end of the day i spent a few minutes for fun. Originally thought i do a quick montage with a farm or a castle on this scape or something similar, but then i came up with something else..... Ian told me i should post it here as it looks like a scene from a Tim Burton movie :D

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Reborn - Photoshop fun by viktorlantos, on Flickr

Would not it be fun to have a contest where we would do similar funny scenes from our aquascapes? :p
 
Ha! Ok victor I'll be happy to add a photoshopped version :) give me a few says to decide what tank I'll be using ;)

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
 
Thank you guys. I had this quick and crazy idea to do something with landscape. Maybe with a cow and a farm or like the above.... Not spent too much time so it was really a few minutes quick montage.

But the montage made me think about that could i do the same on any of my earlier tank? And i have to say nope. It does not mean this tank is any better as the wildness is probably a bit too much for contests or for the standards nowadays. But the montage helps a bit to give back something which had in my mind when i created this hill. It's natural. Uses a few plants only. No straight trimming lines, no visible order on planting. Stones are covered by plants partially, and the different levels on the slope blend the transitions between the front and the back.

It was only for fun, but may will plan my next layout with this in my mind. If i could easily drop the scene to any natural montage theme, then i think i achieved the goal. So my next challenge is this. :D

BTW on the bottom right corner Hydrocotyle and Stauro is a real weed :D Does not matter how hard i kill this remove the full root sytem, replant the tank and rescape it. They will come back for sure..... :angelic: Will remove them before the final shooting.
 
Awesome imagery Viktor. Looks like something out of a Charles Dickens novel :thumbup: All you need now is to put a little lake or something at the depression down the bottom of it and have a menacing looking black dog lapping at the water and it would be scary as well as spectacular :)
 
Cheers guys :D i did not updated this thread in the past weeks.

Since then i had a massive trimming and the tank grown back in 2 weeks or so.

That's how it looks around these days

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I did a short vid too on the center side and played with the fishes a little to simulate kind of a sea movement :D



Enjoy :thumbup:
 
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