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Jaspers Scubaline 240L

jsiegmund

Member
Joined
15 Nov 2014
Messages
167
Location
Netherlands
Hi all, to start off: all the best wishes for 2015! I've been reading a lot on this forum but didn't share my tank yet, so here it is.

A little history: I had a tank between my 12th and 15th but stopped the hobby back then. Last year I got enthused again and bought myself an Eheim / MP 240L scubaline tank. Unfortunately my lack of knowledge back then led me to some unfortunate choices buying both soil and hardscape (seiryu) containing lime. Combined with pretty hard tap water this gave me pretty high hardness (up to general hardness of 11 and carbonate hardness of 10). My plants weren't doing well and so I decided to start over after somewhat over 8 months of running it.

I've swapped the soil to hard grade Akadama and switched to dragon stone for hardscape and added some branches of bonzai wood. A world of difference is the result, now reading general hardness of 8 and carbonate hardness of 1. I expect the latter to raise a bit as the drop is probably a side effect of the new Akadama.

Ok so here are the specs:

Tech
JBL e901 greenline filter
AquaMedic 1000 external CO2 reactor on 2kg cilinder
SMD / RGB LED (Dutch branded Chinese stuff, 54W in total using around 70%)

Plants
Eleocharis parvula
Bacopa sp. Japan
Pogostemon Helferi
Cyperus Helferi
Heternanthera Zosterifolia
Utricularia graminifolia (small pitch)
Riccardia chamedryfolia (on bonzai wood)
Floaters: Hydrocotyle leucocephala and Salvinia natans

Fish
24x Rasbora Heteromorpha
7x Otocinclus Afinis
6x Corydoras Julii
Unknown numbers of cherry & mini japonica shrimp
And two guppy's which were introduced accidentally with a bunch of shrimp

And here are some pics:

Prepping plants from my previous setup
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Used plain Akadama without anything else, did add some root fertilizers to help the stemmed plants
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Experimenting with hardscape lay-outs
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Flora and fauna
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And this is what it currrently looks like:
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There's still room for improvement, I'm waiting a bit to see what the plants are going to do. I'm not quite sure on the location of the stemmed plants yet and probably will switch some stuff around. But for now I first want to make sure everything is doing ok. The cyperus helferi didn't do well in my previous setup and seems to be struggling still. Not quite sure why, it has brown spots on the leaves and some minor algea problems. Rest of the tank seems to be doing pretty well :)

Techwise I want to add a second filter with internal heating so I can remove some more tech from inside of the tank (heating and circulation pump).

If any of you have good ideas on plants / plant layout, that would be very much appreciated!
 
Thanks Alastair! I know what you mean by the far right rock and that's kind of where I broke my intention to create a proper aquascape. I though it might be fun to have an elevated pitch of grass there. It's actually two rocks and they're there to hold the Akadama in place which is about 5cm higher than the surrrounding substrate. It's where I planted the Utricularia graminifolia hoping it will grow to cover the entire pitch. I made the mistake of detaching the mat it came on, so I now have trouble getting it to stick to the soil. It's only a fun experiment, when it fails I'll retry or rearrange the entire thing.
 
I can't see any picture. It seems your hosting site http://www.repsaj.nl/ is not working atm :(
Unfortunately I'm well aware of that. My sucky webhost decided to kill my site and they can't get it up & running again for some reason. And now they've gone off for the weekend :S I'm moving everything over to a new host asap, but that might take a little time. Will be back with more update pics! :)
 
Okay! I transferred my domain onto a new host and everything appears to be working again! Here's a short update.

I've been busy installing the FX5, left the plants to themselves in the meantime. The power of the FX5 is astonishing. At the moment I'd say it's a bit too much even. My fish all seem a bit stressed out by these huge amounts of flow, although it might also be excitement, I'm not quite sure yet. I've got the Tetratec EX 2400 spray bar hooked up to it, which is not long enough to span the entire tank. I ordered a second one, hoping I can add two additional sections. That will serve the purpose of spreading the flow a bit better and reducing the speed of it a little bit. My CO2 reactor is still running on the old filter as I still have to adapt the nozzles to fit the FX5' hoses. When I have that inline as well, I'm pretty sure the resulting flow will be perfect.

As for the flora; the blyxa japonica has pretty much exploded and taken over the mid section. The pogostemon helferi and bacopa sp. japan were struggling, I hope because lack of flow which should now be fixed. I'll increase the CO2 a little bit as well just to be sure. I am still in doubt as to where I'll go with the plants. Want some more contrast in it and should find some well performing plants in general. The cyperus helferi has been difficult from the beginning so those will have to go. To the left I have heteranthera zosterifolia which grows way too fast and won't get real pretty for now. The blyxa I like, but the growth rate is a bit overwhelming compared to other species. Have to spend some time thinking on where to go with this.

Anyway, here are some pictures!
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Edit... almost forgot one important picture which is the result of yesterdays' labour :)
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Last edited:
I had some good tips from you guys, which made me perform some slight changes. The spraybar now runs for the full length of the tank (used modules from 2 sets for 1 bar). Circulation is less speedy but better distributed, cannot find any deadspots. I still have low CO2, so lowered the lighting a bit and busy slowly increasing the CO2 rate. I will be setting up my AM1000 inline with the FX5, using these customized nozzles (DIY):

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Here are some pics of the tank:

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.
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And the overview:
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Getting more and more pleased, but it's not there yet. I would really like to get the pogostemon going. I'm also not entire sure about what to put next to it yet.
 
Pogostemon left the tank, I couldn't get it to feel at home for some reason. Maybe I'll try some fresh ones in a while, but for now I've replaced it with staurogyne repens which does much better.

Pic before maintenance:
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Pic after maintenance (a bit dark because lights were already dimmed, and don't mind the cucumber on the right...):
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Finally plants are beginning to feel at home:
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Staurogyne repens is still transforming from emersed;
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Next up is some work to increase the efficiency of my CO2 reactor, replacing bioballs with some coarse filter floss. At the moment, flow is too much and causes the smaller CO2 bubbles to be pushed out of the spray bar. When my filter was clogged up a bit some weeks ago, CO2 in the tank was much better because the bubbles now actually got the time to dissolve. Never thought too much flow would be a problem ;) And after that, I'm going to rethink plants and scape a bit, not pleased with that yet.
 
Hmmm, guess it's been almost a year that I've posted an update to this tank. Well this last weekend I decided to rescape the entire thing and I must say that I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Whereas my previous "scape" was maybe not that eye-catching, I think this new one is far more intriguing. So without further ado, here it is:

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Obviously the filter intake and skimmer on the right aren't very pretty, still thinking about possible solutions. For now I'm not really bothered by them though.

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Let me know your thoughts!
 
That's an interesting rescape, look forward to seeing it grow in. Do you have any pictures to share of how the tank finally looked before the rescape?

I'm about to rescape my own tank, so would be interested to know your process. Was it fish out for the day and rescape then back in? I'm switching to a new substrate, so need to take the tank right back to nothing.
 
@Nelson thanks!

@Wisey only have an overexposed crappy phone pic, but this is what I started with:
IMG_20160129_173602.png


I didn't take the water or fish out for this change. I first got some plants out and used a hose to suck out some of the soil (mainly the right part where the sand now is). Ran lights on maintenance mode which is just enough to see what I'm doing. Not sure whether that matters but I didn't want to give algae the opportunity to benefit too much from the changes. I then carefully rearranged the soil, giving the cloudiness time to settle. After each "phase" I ran the filter for a while to make sure the bacteria in there didn't die. Also tried to keep at least some plants in there so the fish had somewhere to go hide. Then did the hard scape lay-out until I was happy with it and got some of the plants back in.

I thought I killed one of my vampire shrimp which I didn't notice sitting in the trident when pulling it out, but even that one made it. Apart from that I only lost a few baby shrimp I think, which is pretty much inevitable.

Based on this experience I would be pretty confident that swapping soil is doable keeping the water in. Suck it out with a hose and make sure that what you're putting in there is clean and doesn't come with a lot of new ammonia. Maybe use something to get bacteria in there, I read there are folks to treat their new soil with bacteria + waste from the old tank in order to kickstart bacteria growth in there. Not sure if that's needed or not.
 
Thanks for the pre-rescape shot, it's interesting to see, you got good plant growth there even though you wanted to change things around. I think for me I will need to remove everything. My substrate is tropica plant growth substrate with Unipac limpopo sand over the top. That Tropica stuff really goes cloudy when you disturb it, so I think it will be fish out, bogwood out, then all the substrate out and clean the entire tank before starting fresh with Tropica Aqua Soil for the planting area and a different Unipac sand for my foreground. Thanks for sharing your method though. I also need to apply a new background as the current one is peeling off which will require moving the tank, so the lighter the better.
 
Well not everything was doing great (the overexposed photo compensates...) but in general I had good growth indeed. Akadama I have for soil was in good share still so I didn't bother taking that out at this time. But indeed, if you have so much work to do then you're much better off taking everything out. A bit more work but definitely easier, also for scaping. Arranging stuff continuously getting everything wet is annoying :)
 
I thought I had updated this thread more often but it seems I didn't. So here's a well overdue update then.

Lets starft with an overview:

DSC00415.png


As you might see when you compare photos, I switched lighting. I got rid of the old blue-ish LEDs I had and replaced then with a much more natural daylight color, works great for this scape in my opinion. In the meantime I've been battling BBA which I do have under control now. It's still there, but stays in place without any effort so I'm ok with that.

Although I'm quite happy with how it is now, I'm already itching to start up a new scape. Will have to wait a bit though as my girlfriend and I are considering to move and I don't want to set-up a new scape only to have to tear it down again after a few months. I will probably also use the opportunity to switch to a different, more scape friendly, tank (this one isn't deep enough). And perhaps go open top as well :) Anyway, that's then and this is now:

Moss seems to be enyoing the water and light:

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Alternanthera Reineckii, still not as pretty as I hoped it would be. Iron shouldn't be the problem, I'm not sure what is.
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And this is the view from where I sit to work (yes, this does distract)
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