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Aqua at pet shop - Season 2 - layout #6

Alexander Belchenko

Alexander Belchenko

Member
Joined
23 Sep 2013
Messages
1,242
Location
Ukraine
Hi there, it's continuation of my thread http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/aqua-at-pet-shop-layout-no-3-the-end.32339/ so I think we can call it "season 2". The same pet shop, the same tank, the same equipment, different layouts. I hope you will like it.

Contents:

Layout #4
Layout #5
Layout #6
Tank spec:
  • 60x30x36 - optiwhite
  • DIY light with 2*36W PL-C light bulbs, I like combination of OSRAM bulbs 840+880. Light period is usually 7-8 hours on timer.
  • Tetra EX 600 external canister filter (roughly measured flow ~400LPH)
  • CO2 injection 24/7 to get pH~6.5-7.0, sometimes using air pump when light went off
  • Liquid fertilizers, Ro+tap water to get KH~3-4, remineralize to increase GH up to 8-10.
Last good* picture of the tank:

2 months (IAPLC calling)
26988652721_049b158eff_z.jpg60x30x36 - 2 months by Alexander, on Flickr
 

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2015/09/13 - dry start - 1st week

Layout was made previous weekend with help of another scaper in my town, his name is Stanislav, he has helped me with previous layout no.3 which is the best of my work so far. Stanislav is relatively newbie, last year he started to ask me advices on his first big aquascape (100L), but he's very good at rocks hardscape, so I'm learning from him of this, while teaching and helping him with plants secrets.

I bought 2 big stones for new layout, but they're not as tall as I'd like to have, so we spent more than hour trying to find the best composition of these 2. It was funny, but the truth is: using only 2 stones with very strong character is not easy. These stones didn't want to be placed in some combinations, several combinations required additional stones, some variants were too flat, or not high enough. So in the end we ended with something like that (already planted, no photo of bare hardscape sorry):

21258176820_fd87a0af82_c.jpg60x30x36 - dry start - 1st week by Alexander, on Flickr

It has good height, IMO.

As you can see there are quite steep slopes at the back, so I'm worry a little about it. As I will be out of town for more than week soon, I decided to begin with dry start method. I hope several weeks in dry start will be enough for plants to develop proper roots and start growing, so plants will hold the slopes from collapse.

I decided to re-use dwarf hairgrass from previous layout, and some stems as well. And try my luck with HC cuba this time. I've used already emersed cuba there, so it should start quite fast, I guess. Hairgrass will need more time to adapt.

Another angle:

21454733541_995936d468.jpg60x30x36 - dry start - 1st week by Alexander, on Flickr

Your opinions are welcome. I have three or maybe more weeks of dry start, and can do some adjustments.
 
Dry start chronicles

I've never tried dry start method before, but thanks to this forum I was informed about it - I saw many inspiring examples in other journals.

Usually I just put water in and try to find balance in next weeks. This time I decided to go dry first for 2 reasons: I was going to vacation just in 2 weeks after starting new layout and I knew nobody will care about this tank as I do, so leaving it for too long time without my inspection was too risky. (And I was right!) And second reason: There is two quite high slopes around stones and I wanted hairgrass to properly root there to keep the slopes from collapsing when I put the water. This weekend I'm going to flood it, so I will have opportunity to verify the second argument.

I'll put pictures later in chronological order, so you can see how it evolved over last month.

When I returned from my vacation in sunny Kemer I was surprised by the state of plants. As I might predict nobody sprayed plants in my absence, neither ventilate the cover. Sigh. But overall the tank still going in the right direction: some hc has died, hairgrass was yellow with some tiny green new leaves. Hedyotis has gone mad and grown a lot. After that I started to spray and ventilate regularly and guess when I can finally flood it.

Also dry start period allowed me to think better about layout and suddenly I realized that we put big amount of styrofoam behind the rocks to make the substrate higher but I totally forgot to put some weight on it to avoid floating. SO, dig out the substrate, put some flat stones, put substrate back, replant hc. Now I see that thanks to rocks the level of substrate on the top (between rocks tips) is way too high, need to remove some. It seems hc at the top will have no chance to attach properly. Sigh.

The good news: I can see hairgrass to develop new shoots deep under substrate like it did at the beginning, I hope that means it developed enough roots and my slopes are safe? Anyway, I'd like to flood it this saturday. If you have any thoughts about it - please say quickly.

Let's see photos:

1st week
21258176820_fd87a0af82.jpg60x30x36 - dry start - 1st week by Alexander, on Flickr

2nd week
22010352880_9275719e23.jpg60x30x36 - dry start - 2nd week by Alexander, on Flickr

1 month (after my vacation)
22010403140_ea9820c786.jpg60x30x36 - dry start - 1 month by Alexander, on Flickr

5.5 weeks - current state. I've trimmed hedyotis and put rocks under substrate on top.
22198663895_ca93dcdaf0.jpg60x30x36 - dry start - 5.5 weeks by Alexander, on Flickr

Closeup before trim
21577496173_9e7e0a2177.jpg60x30x36 - dry start - 1 month by Alexander, on Flickr

Hairgrass at the back
22172523286_e8c2641898.jpgDry start - back side - hairgrass&[HASHTAG]#x27[/HASHTAG]; roots by Alexander, on Flickr

Thanks for watching.
 
Well done.
I really enjoy your journals as they contain many adventures :D
- from which we all get to learn :)

I finally bought an ADA tank - a 45P & an Aquasky!
This tank is also in "dry start" - not because I planned this but my ordered filter is not arriving (shop promised only a couple days) ... 10 days later, no filter in sight - not even on paper :(

& my wood keeps floating anyway :watching:
 
Hi Alexander

Love the stones work! I guess it was not easy...

I never had luck with hairgrass in emersed form (except two plants in a moss setup I have right now). Every time I have tried to pass it from submersed to emersed I have ended up with brown leaves. The only time things went better was by flooding the plants in an invitro cup. The water level was covering most of the plants and then slowly reduced... I could see new growth but then I left home for a long weekend and when I came back I found that some birds had destroyed everything :(

Jordi
 
Working on hardscape for layout #4
parotet said:
Love the stones work! I guess it was not easy...
Click to expand...

Yeah, Jordi, it wasn't easy.

So, we have 2 stones (only). I said "we" because there were 3 of us: my new aquascaper friend Stas who helped me with previous layout, me, and another one guy, who liked my previous work and hairgrass very much and asked to see how we made new layout. I allowed him to join the process with the condition: he should help us. By the way, my new aquascaper friend Stas is very good at stones work, and I think he has real talent to iwagumi, look at his latest layout here.

What do you think: how many hardscape variants you can make out of only 2 stones? I'm not sure we found all of them, but I was very surprised by number of combinations. We spent about 1 hour turning and moving stones in sandbox, then moved stones inside tank and next hour tried there. I was tired of all this trial & error and asked guys to finally use variant with biggest height of the layout. Below some photos of this process and almost final hardscape.

22124184909_38075cc2c2.jpglayout #4 - hardscape variants by Alexander, on Flickr

21688314744_a749e3b52f.jpg60x30x36 - hardscape by Alexander, on Flickr

Then we placed stones on platforms from styrofoam, put substrate back to the tank, made big slopes and start to plant. I should say that I spent almost all next week planting the tank, bought some more plants, and thus dry start began.
 
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2015/10/17 - Wet start

Last weekend after 6 weeks of dry start I've finally put the water in. The hills haven't collapsed - and that's great. But in some places substrate fell down into invisible caverns between/under rocks I guess, so I had to add some fresh substrate. Also, the hill where hc comes to the front glass has partially collapsed, you can see it on the photo. I'm going to fix it later when all plants properly root and establish themselves.

Photo was taken on the next day after flooding.

21687707344_0062e14100_z.jpg60x30x36 - 2nd day with water by Alexander, on Flickr

I got some positive feedback on the photo of bare hardscape without substrate (see my previous message), and now I think we shouldn't have added so big hills around rocks. Maybe I will redo this layout in the future, maybe if I get more rocks of such structure to add to the layout.

Right now the light period is 4 hours, minimal dose of ferts and inject CO2.

Yesterday I did first ~50% water change, and noticed quite bad diatoms in the middle of the right rock. It seems that area does not have enough flow. I have no idea how to improve flow in the middle, it seems flow today is almost circular with stagnant area in the middle (that was the problem as well in previous layout). I'm going to install spraybar at the back again, just need to figure out how to inject CO2. Maybe I will put it directly into filter inflow. Another option is to buy small pump and use it to distribute CO2.

Any tips?
 
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2015/10/25 - 1st week with water

Today I've installed spray bar as planned. The only problem was CO2 distribution. I got advice about using small pump to push CO2 bubbles around the tank, bought cheap 200 l/h model (and it's very tiny) and despite my scepticism it works quite good. I need to replace skimmer with similar small pump later, and I think I will cover all areas with good flow.

Here is picture before maintenance, you can easily spot areas with bad flow - they are ugly, and look dirty from diatoms. Also a bit of blue-green algae starts to appear over the hc.

22280310498_5ebc41ff9a_z.jpg60x30x36 - 1 week with water by Alexander, on Flickr

I've applied liquid carbon to those areas using syringe, and after some time it was very easy to brush those algae out. Way too easy, I wonder if my rocks are actually limestome rocks. I haven't tested water parameters yet, should do that next week.

After maintenance and with all new equipment:

22442083096_ded6122649_z.jpg60x30x36 - 1 week with water by Alexander, on Flickr

Sorry for white haze - that's seachem equilibrium solution.

Now all plants are swaying very noticeable, I can see CO2 bubbles go to the middle of the tank, where hc comes down the hill. I hope that's improve situation with algae.

Now I just need to get rid off this ugly inlet pipe by eheim. Hopefully next week pictures will be without this green monster.
 
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Btw, I've tried to measure throughput of tetra 600 in this setup. It's strange but I got the same numbers with and without filter media: about 6.75 lpm or roughly 400 lph. Giving in mind there is about 40-50 l of water - I can assume it should be enough, although it's not enough without spray bar to properly cover all areas.
 
2015/11/14 - 4 weeks - layout is cancelled

Sad news. I decided to redo this layout due to problems with flow and CO2 I had in past weeks. Without spraybar I can't get even flow in the middle of the rocks, but with spraybar I can't get good CO2 level. Also, I have serious suspicious about those rocks. It seems they affect water chemistry: slightly raise KH and prevent me to get decent pH drop with CO2 injection. Honestly, I thought: let's wait and see up to New Year, and if things won't go on track, I'll redo the layout. But in fact my patience just died today.

This is the photo I took before dismantle it.

22398635833_d0ea5f3c3f.jpg60x30x36 - 4 weeks - sudden final by Alexander, on Flickr

As you can see there is a lot of diatoms on the rocks, glass and plants. Hc don't want to grow at all. Some of it has melted. I was about to replace it with some simpler plant. But diatoms killed my desire to continue working on this. Sorry.

I want to make new layout with a lot of stems and some branch wood.
 
That is a shame as I really liked the rock layout you had. Hopefully the next one will be more successful

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk
 
I'm very sorry for not updating the journal - too much RL and new year holidays. Anyway, I'd like to show you the current state of the tank, it's already 1.5 months old, and looks very nice now. Almost no algae, I'm happy.

Before maintenance:

23826211544_574748806b_z.jpg60x30x36 - 1.5 months by Alexander, on Flickr

24371990221_088241c9f4_z.jpg60x30x36 - 1.5 months by Alexander, on Flickr

After maintenance:

24454761455_5ab251cb57_z.jpg60x30x36 - 1.5 months by Alexander, on Flickr

As you can see from the shots - I'm using Eheim Flowpipe on the outlet of the filter. I'm very happy by this flowpipe. At first glance it looks like poorman's lily pipe, but in fact it's much more than this! It's plastic, so it's much safer to use in public place like pet shop - the tank stands dangerously close to counter and a lot of people walk around the tank and even bump into it, many times I saw they touch the pipes with their body parts. But more important - it has slow flow feature: small round circle placed right in front of the output jet and it slows down the flow very effectively, but in the same time does not affect the turnover. I'm very happy with this device, and fish seem to enjoy slow flow as well.

24086657959_7dd004edfb_n.jpgEHEIM flowpipe - close-up by Alexander, on Flickr
24372002791_928803dd19_n.jpgEHEIM flowpipe - back view by Alexander, on Flickr
 
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