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Welcome nick

Hi Alvin 👋

Gday and welcome Anthony.

Meet the newest addition to the tank, Mr Nimbus the giant plakat Betta. In other news it seems my blue rams are not the greatest first time parents. I think they ate their babies :rolleyes: Here they are having another go:

Here is a 300L tank of mine from a few years ago just at the start of a dry start.

Thanks Killi and Packman. Here is a wall shot of the tank from today. Whenever I'm doing work I will put a towel on the floor of both sides. The panel above opens all the way up on both sides, which is necessary because the tank is 90cm across. Instead of vacuuming gravel, I just blast the...

Thanks Gorillastomp. That plant would be Hygrophila Balsamica.

Congrats on the new camera! It is the perfect hobby to compliment keeping an aquarium. Any lenses you thinking to buy?

Completely agree, one of my top 5 favourite plants :) Cheers Shangman. Thanks Wookie, right now one of my 3 kessil a360x lights is broken. The other two are peaking at 85%, with red and amber maxed. I previously had them going to 100%, but I want to start to slow down growth a bit. The camera...

Week 10 and the villagers are happy. Here are some pictures from last week. Emperor tetras swimming through the pass. Corydoras just chilling. German blue rams playing. Blue rams with fry (tiny dots under the lower ram). They didn't waste any time!

Thanks Courtney, going to go back to dosing everything and see if that clears up the problem. Also noticed that my new bolbitis leaves were coming in a bit yellow. Hopefully the extra nitrate sorts that all out.

My water is about 5ppm nitrate, and fish stock is still light

Hi folks, last week I stopped dosing nitrate then saw this happen to the staurogyne repens: Another possibility is that the root tabs in the area have depleted, because this is the only affected patch. There is a co2 drop checker nearby that goes lime green to yellow. What else might cause...

Week 5 and the tank has gone through some trims, and overall everything seems to be more or less growing. Here are the latest pics: While the plants are all healthy, I think I lack the skills to make things grow neatly :rolleyes: So mad respect to those pros who make it look effortless...

Thanks for the id folks. These things sound terrifying.

I spotted this guy in my tank and managed to catch him by blinding him with a flashlight and nabbing him with some tweezers. He was darting around the tank like a shrimp, but after pulling him out it seems like he has short wings. Anyone know what this guy is? He is about 2cm long.

I would start by adding a couple of small fans over the tank. This should knock a few degrees off your temperature and you can put them on a timer to switch off at night so that temperatures don't swing too much. In my experience evaporation isn't a big deal. Just keep a bottle of water near...

After rinsing the water hyacinths in the filter socks for a few days I think I've gotten all the critters. As a reward for my efforts my plants gave me a flower today 🙃

I had decent success drilling holes through my wood then threading zip ties through and attaching it to lava rocks. I did it this way to keep everything out of sight. A problem i later faced though was some lava rocks blocking my planting. I found it tricky to super glue wood to lava rock due...

Agree with everything said above. Also since I don't think it was mentioned yet, when it comes time to add livestock try and do that gradually over a few weeks. This will give the tank time to adapt to the increasing bioload.

Welcome 😁

Take a look here: My 200g window . Even though I'm using 2x30cm tall reactors here, I over engineered it and I think one would be fine. Throughout the day I'm getting a 1.4 ph drop, and the reactors are not filling up with gas so there is plenty of room to move.

This might be of interest My 200g window The atomizer + reactor combination lead to 100% dissolution quickly, which I think you are after if you want to be efficient with co2 usage. My tap water is 7.2 ph, kh 1, and over 3 hours this setup is now dropping my ph down to 5.7 - 5.8. My sump is...

My untested instinct is that rate of co2 dissolution should be proportional to contact time multiplied by contact area (as well as other things). With an inline diffuser or needle wheel pump to mist co2 before it enters a reactor, the surface area of the co2 grows exponentially. I use this...

Welcome

Welcome

No fish yet unfortunately. If water boarding them doesn't work I'll add a few fish into the sump.

Thanks oldguy, much appreciated. I read that they do lot like vinegar. Would periodic spraying of a vinegar solution eventually eradicate them?

I looked in my sump earlier to see thousands of these horrors crawling over the floating plants. Does anyone know what they are, or how I can safely move them on?

Looking sweet. Some crypts along the shoreline might be a nice transition to the sand. And i see room for some floating plants too.

Looking great

Day 15 I ordered 20 ottos for my tank on day 4, expecting them to arrive 2 weeks later. 3 days later they showed up! Here are some pics of the little guys enjoying the space. So far I've fished out 1 dead body, and have seen at most 14 in view at the same time. They are good at hiding so...

Welcome mate. I agree, doing is the best way of learning. Looking forward to seeing your tank.

If you want to read fractional kh from your test, then just use 4x as much water and count each drop as 0.25 degrees kh.

Thanks for the tips!

I'm most definitely losing some co2 out the top of the sump, but equivalently I would be losing it from the display tank that has double the surface area. I've tried to minimize the amount of surface movement in the sump, and am trying to grow a co2 cover for the sump out of frogbit. I have...

Hi foxfish, no need to apologize. I spent way too many hours pondering different strategies for getting co2 in to my tank as it is a tricky topic. I made a diagram to hopefully explain what I did a bit better. All the equipment in the diagram sits submerged in the final stage of the sump. My...

Thanks foxfish. I connected the output of the reactors to the input area of the return pump as shown below. The return pump turnover on paper is about 5x of the reactor pump, so I assume almost all of it is sucked into the return pump.

Cheers Darrel, really appreciate the expertise.

A friend sent me an image of this algae he has been suffering. I'm not even sure it is algae or some kind of weed. Photo of it below (being held in the silver pincers). Does anyone know what this is? Thanks heaps.

Cheers, appreciate the emphatic advice :wideyed: :thumbup: Guess I'm influenced by those websites telling me to dip my plants in bleach before letting them enter the tank. Right now I have no visible bugs or snails, just over planning. It is day 5 for the tank now and everything looks to be...

I like this a lot. I think the shadows in the foreground make it interesting.

Soil on top of sand drives me nuts as well. But i've never been able to avoid a mess when I have both soil and sand in the same tank. Eventually you slip up and that white sandy beach never looks the same again. Right now I'm experimenting with skipping the soil entirely, and relying on tabs...

Looks amazing. Would you say that is 1 years growth for the bolbitis heudelotii and microsorum narrow? Or would it be much bigger if not for trimmings? I ask since I just planted these two species but have no idea how long I will need to wait for them to start to get massive.

Thanks for the kinds words Tim. Time for another update. I spent Friday evening testing the sump and the automatic water change system. After a bit of tweaking with baffle heights, the whole system is pretty silent (around 40db from outside the cabinet). Zero splashing, but the sicce sdc...

In the past for stem plants in shallow substrate i have simple put a small dot of superglue near the base of the plant and glued on a pebble. The pebble is hidden under the substrate and between the friction and weight of the pebble the plant can stay.

Thanks Joe. Eagle eyes you have there, it is indeed an RO water line. An important part of operation lazy.

It is pouring down with rain outside today. Perfect weather to spend some time trying to get my tank going. Which is great because my sand delivery just recently arrived. This is my layout from the front side: and from the back side: Now I just need a truck load of plants...

May I know what kind of moss that is? What is your secret to making it to grow so well?

Exciting project! Keen to see this develop. Have you given much thought to what kind of scape will work well with the dimensions given it is view-able from two sides?

I'm in the process of evaluating a few sands as well, so I will share. Here is a close up pic of the JBL Sansibar River sand. Pretty impressed by this stuff. The Sansibar Red and Sansibar Orange has a finer grain than this (no pic sorry). This next sand is the Ans Bright sand, which is finer...

Right. Left is too yellow

Yeah that wood chisel I used was weak as. Just ordered a tungsten metal alloy rock chisel to sort this prehistoric tree branch out. I guess I could always use another kind of rock shrapnel to decorate my sand.. but then the colors wouldn't match 😅

I'm trying to smash a petrified wood chunk into small bits, but not having much luck so far. I tried a hammer and chisel, but that just dented the chisel. I also tried a straight hammer, but that dented my hammer and chopping block. The petrified wood is laughing at me.. I'm thinking about...

Straighten a fishing hook and tape it to a pipe cleaner. Insert it into the sponge so the barb catches, then slowly remove. But.. since you can only access it from one end you are never going to be able to clean out all that other gunk... 😅 i assume that was what you were trying to do in the...

Had some time to play with some layouts over the weekend. Im finding it quite challenging find something that works ok from both viewing angles. Here is one rough layout idea that I'm liking. The lava stone is temporary. Planning to use petrified wood chunks and white sand as the base...

Thanks Zeus, that calculator looks very useful, I will study it once I get off work. And thanks for the information Oldguy. At a high level I'm hearing: don't dose PO4 at the same time as FE or Ca. I picked up a copy of my water report, and Mg is about 1.4 ppm, although the range they quote...

My apologies if this topic has been beaten to death so please bear with me. I'm currently working out my dry fert dosing regime, and to simplify things each day I'd like to pre mix my ingredients into perhaps just three containers, then spoon salts in from there. I'd like to know: Which...

Love the colors, and the pleco

Thx london dragon. Yeah the co2 is something I'm a bit concerned about. Will give it a test run, and if it is close but no cigar ill get a second dupla. If it isnt close at all then I guess I'll need some help lol.

For lighting I have 3 Kessil A360x tuna suns, and another Chinese made pendant light in the sump. For filtration I have a bean animal overflow into a 50 gallon sump. The return pump is a Sicce Syncra SDC 7.0. I'm planning to run a co2 reactor on a separate loop with the output being fed into...

Week 5 (latest) full tank shot: *** I've been planning a big tank for some time, then covid happened and my condo renovation got delayed months. Happy to say that things are finally moving forward, so I can start to share a few photos of my progress. So the main idea here is to build an...

It will depend on the size of the waiter container I put it in. I can refill it daily. I'm hoping that the additional ventilation will prevent mold issues, which I ran into the last time I tried this. My main concern is whether the fog produced by this will provide sufficient moisture to the...

Has anyone used one of these cheap ultrasonic mist generators to dry start grow moss? I'm thinking about trying this out in a container using the moss yogurt blender method. I'm proposing to leave the container uncovered for good ventilation under high lights, but run the mist generator non...

A picture tells a thousand words, so I'll try and keep this post short and rely on a picture below. After studying many of the sump designs shared online I am narrowing in on how I want to build my own. I've shared a design below and listed some of the main features. All kinds of feedback...

I keep mine filled right to the brim. When my water quality is bad and when i use a lot of h202 i had a lot of jumpers though.

Thanks for the insights Wookii. Overlaying the spiral onto those images is reminiscent of technical trading, but there is no denying that the scapes are stunning. I was looking a bit more into this and I found it interesting that the standard aspect ratio for computer monitors and TVs have...

Just make sure you don't have any soap residue in your storage container. My wife once used one my my aquarium buckets to mop the floor without my knowledge. I later used it to hold a fish, which ended badly for the poor guy.

Hi Frenchman, some nice wood you have there ;) I agree on leaving the right open, especially since the branches are hanging over that area. I'd also be concerned that the main wood feature is a bit too large for the tank. Once plants are grown up it might all get a bit crowded.

Settle down there Simon, I might crack a rib from laughing so much. Seriously though, I get your point about attractiveness being subjective. That said there is a reason why certain tank proportions are popular. Inserting this into a wall further complicates it. I think I'll just build a...

Thanks for the input Hufsa. In terms of the flow, I plan to run a sump filter, with water coming in on one side of the tank and leaving on the opposite side. This should hopefully ensure I get a uniform water movement across the length of the tank. My focus will be on the scape with fish...

I am renovating my condo, and will have space to put insert a long fish tank into the wall separating my study from my living room. I now know that the maximum dimensions the tank can be are: 1800mm long, 850mm wide, 500mm high. The tank will be visible from both sides, but not from above...

I'm looking at hanging 3 of these lights for my new tank. I like the controllability, and the shimmer I've seen in videos looks nice (with the diffuser). Also I'm a sucker for RGB lighting effects. My tank is 1800 long 600 wide 400 high, and I'll be running a sump filter (lots of surface...

What is the gallons per hour your are pushing through the sump, and what is the cross sectional area for flow connecting the first and second chamber to achieve gentle flow but high turnover? Also, what do you mean by a shepherds hook? I'm interested in any ideas that might help to keep a sump...

Interesting idea with the foam baffles Mr Shenanagins. I was reading that 20ppi foam is the equivalent of 840 microns. How effective is that as mechanical filtration? I would have presumed a lot of visible particles would escape to the display tank. I guess one advantage of the surface scum...

Thanks for the input, and I do see the point being made. If I had the time I'd like to build prototypes, but since I plan on building this just once I want it to have a decent chance of success. This got me reading a bit more about commercial particle separation methods, and it is not a...

I'm not familiar with the Tunze filter system. I've seen some people place bags of bio media in a sump / in a tank, and I'm just wondering how effective that is.

Does anyone have any knowledge on the relationship between water flow rate and the effectiveness of biological filter material? How would a bag of bio balls in the middle of a sump refrigerium perform compared to the same bag having all flow directed through them via some baffles? Would...

Given gravity, would the particles get stuck to the sponge or preference floating around in the water? If they float around in the water, then they should all clear out when I flush the chamber via the lower drain.

Hi all, I'm planning a new 100 gallon long planted tank, and I would like to run an idea by the folks here on an aspect of my sump filter design. The basic idea illustrated in the image attached shows water falling from the main tank into a detritus settling chamber. Waste is free to float...

Hi folks, looking forward to learning from everybody here, and hopefully contributing a little too. Currently having fun with my 140x45x45 cm high tech tank, and planning another :)

I got a set of these, and was very impressed. My lilly pipes were very difficult to clean, and got dirty easily, so I replaced them with these. In my opinion they look a lot better. Sleek and unobtrusive. Also, algae struggles to grow on them.