• You are viewing the forum as a Guest, please login (you can use your Facebook, Twitter, Google or Microsoft account to login) or register using this link: Log in or Sign Up

GA in-store display - Moss forest 180L

viktorlantos

Aquascaper
Joined
25 Oct 2008
Messages
1,598
Location
Budapest, Hungary
Cheers guys, i thought i share another tank with you which we're building up in the past few months. This is an experimental project as we wanted a stem tank in our showroom with some mosses on the wood decor.

Tank specs:

90P OptiWhite
Eheim 2075 filter
2 x Hydor 1600
Aqua Soil Malaya with ADA Mekong Sand
ATI Sun Power T5 - 4x39W
ADA Softenizer
Pressurized CO2 with ceramic diffuser
Decor: ADA Iron Wood

Plants: Taxiphyllum barbieri (Vesicularia), Vesicularia dubyana 'Christmas', Eleocharis Parvula, Hemianthus micranthemoides, Myriophyllum matogrossense, Proserpinaca palustris ''Cuba'', Micranthemum umbrosum, Rotala rotundifolia, Echinodorus tenellus, Anubias Nana, Hygrophila pinnatifida

start on 2011. jan. 23

5384105904_2d323fcac2_z.jpg


feb 15 with some guppys :D

5448166217_58000e7372_z.jpg


march 10.

5515551850_373d11fee1_z.jpg


april 14.

5619303137_9ea25feded_z.jpg


april 26.

5658139733_ee39785897_z.jpg


and today after a trim last week... sorry i captured without tripod and daytime

5707896112_dfa13b3449_z.jpg


5707919332_3092a43462_z.jpg


5707921488_aa91c277e5_z.jpg


thanks for watching ;)
hope the stems wil grow up next week to the surface level then we will shoot the IAPLC photo. :thumbup:
 
That looks so natural and lush! Great work, Victor! :thumbup:

Real example of Nature aquarium, I like how the moss has overtaken the driftwood.

What is your fertilising regime? What ferts are you using?

As you are using softeniser I suppose you are using water straight from the tap? What are the parameters before and after the softeniser?
 
Beautiful! I'd like to see it trimmed super hard to give the moss the same shape it had in the march the 10th picture.
I'm super envious Viktor, I wish I could turn this hobby into a job like you have.
 
BigTom said:
Beautiful stuff. I like how you've left the wood in the center exposed to offset everything else.

thanks mate ;) yup we never trimmed the moss there.
i could not capture how beauty and clean it is, but the soft water made miracle with this type of moss.

ianho said:
lovely looking tank, what is the moss on the bottom?

Thank you. :angelic:
Christmas Moss, same as on the left wood. Used Riccia Stone there to keep it in shape.

Antoni said:
That looks so natural and lush! Great work, Victor!
Real example of Nature aquarium, I like how the moss has overtaken the driftwood.

thanks my friend :thumbup:

Antoni said:
What is your fertilising regime? What ferts are you using?

We're using our own premixed EI ferts on this tank along with daily Easy Carbo. Other than that just cold soft water at water changes. Water temp is around 21-24 celsius.

Antoni said:
As you are using softeniser I suppose you are using water straight from the tap? What are the parameters before and after the softeniser?

well actually we put the softenizer in only for demo purposes. to learn more about it and show the functionality to our visitors. this softenizer reduce a bit of the hardness only from your tap water. Around 4-5 degrees. Maybe if you combo this with the Palm Net from ADA (if you're using the ADA system) you can have even softer water.
But we're using RO in our tanks. We left it in to see how much trouble to clean it. How frequently need to change the resin, what kind of problems users can have with the piping. So the past month helped a lot to learn all about it.

Garuf said:
hard to give the moss the same shape it had in the march the 10th picture.
I'm super envious Viktor, I wish I could turn this hobby into a job like you have.

thank you sir :D
yup well i guess a heavy trimming would help a lot on many places, but we just gave it a go. maybe after the photo shooting we will refine the tank to see if we could give it a different look. but i agree with you the moss - along with some other species - just overgrown. :angelic:

the fun part of the job when the tanks looks good and you see the happy faces of the visitors and friends, but maintain a hell lot of tank and the business itself sometimes kill the creativity and the fun. i guess the hardest to be more on the hobby side and learn to enjoy it daily, meanwhile the business not get hurt. anyway we do this because we love aquascaping, everything else does not matter.

i am pretty happy that we can share our tanks here and we also can see many of yours which we enjoy so much. we're individuals here not business owners and if i see this way, this is pretty cool that we can play with so many tanks. :shh: :D :angelic:
 
bigmatt said:
well that's pretty much perfect. I hate you :D On a serious note i hear conflicting things about RO - do you think it makes a difference? Matt

:D

On RO i only can tell you our experiences. Using a 3 membrane system to generate RO water in the store. This is a pretty effective system produces less waste water because of the 3 membranes and around 1000 l / day RO or more.

We put it into a large barell but it is cold. Around 15 celsius. We measured a low pH in the barell around 5.8.

Originally we wanted to mix the RO with tap water, but we gave a 2 months test to see how it works without tap mix.
So now we only use pure RO.

All the plants looks awesome. The best HC what i ever seen in my life :D Mosses looks great. Less algae issues with the right CO2 injection and balance. Fishes, shrimps love it. On shrimps we do add minerals of course. And this way we keep CRS easily in planted tanks too.

But there's a positive experience since we're using. I am using it at home too, but this is different when you see a lot of tank with different settings and they all works great.

One thing we need to take care is the pH. Because of the low pH from the RO water it could happen that the pH drops below 6 if we do frequent and large water changes.

I've seen Furcata's falling down because of the Osmo shock when the pH dropped below 6. So we measure the water at every water changes to avoid any pH issues, and if needed we add a bit of Seachem pH changer powder directly to the tank. We have around pH 6.5 in average on the plant tanks. Usually pH 6.5-7.

For a nano tank it's not worth it i guess, but on larger tanks you will see differences in plant health for sure.
 
Great looking tank.
I suspect the osmo shock is from a sudden change in TDS levels rather than pH.
 
a1Matt said:
Great looking tank.
I suspect the osmo shock is from a sudden change in TDS levels rather than pH.

Thanks my friend. :angelic:

Well here is the thing. I did water changes on multiple tanks at that time. They were all around 6.3-6.4 pH originally.
Other tanks worked great after water changes, probably those fishes aren't that sensitive as Popondetta Furcata's.

We do water changes with a garden pipe driven by an Eheim compact. This means the refilling happens quick enough. When i filled the tanks i've seen that the furcatas swimming through the fresh osmo water and some of them got shocked and falled down in a few seconds. I never seen this before. Just like a when a bird get shot. It was quite shocking. And for the first sight we did not know what could be the problem as all of our other tank was ok after the change.

Those fishes which still swimmed not swimmed anymore in a team. When i measured the water the pH was similar like in our barell around 5.8. We added in a spoon of Seachem Neutral Regulator and all those fish become relaxed in seconds and formed team again.

The rest of our tanks were also low on pH this time so i adjusted them a bit to the normal level.

I only can think of a pH issue because of this. The only reason we realized it, because of the sudden reaction from these sensitive fishes.
 
I'm in total awe of your work.

Incredibly inspiring! :D

Do you have a favourite type of moss to work with Viktor? I've only ever used Java and would be interested to see if you had any preference to one particular type. For it's shape, growing habits etc?

Cheers, Tom
 
This is one of the best I've seen from you/GA - it's beautiful on many levels.

The fine textures of the mosses and stems make it look so inviting - sumptuous!

You guys are really living the dream with having the opportunity to aquascape and share your passion on such a great level. It's really awe-inspiring.

Thanks for sharing, and keep up the wonderful work. :thumbup:
 
Thanks for the info on softenizer, Victor! That is the best way to know how something works, is it good for use and what issues may arise - unprofessional attitude :thumbup: It will be appreciated if you could share your experience so far, regarding cleaning, time the resin lasts etc..

With no intention to hijack the topic... I'm really interested what is causing this swing in the pH. IMO a reason could be the low kH of the RO water, which lacks a buffer capacity if it has value under 4-5. But probably the substrate is playing role here too. As far as I''m aware the Malaya is lowering kH and pH most of all Aquasoil substrates, so this could be the major player for the swing :geek: and that is why you are experiencing this in this tank only.

Just out of curiosity, what the pH of the tank with the hemianthus is?

I'm really interested to know, how phosphate based buffer such as Seachem Neutral Regulator increases pH,
"by precipitating calcium and magnesium while removing any chlorine, chloramine, or ammonia"
 
nah guys thanks for the warm welcome with this scape. last night we had a photo shoothing for the iaplc and we shoot this tank too. amazing what a 5D Mark II can do with professional lighting. You will be shocked by the moss details later when we share the photos. :D

thanks for all of your nice feedback. all of this would not worth anything if we could not share and talk about it. so communities like UKAPS makes the real sense. we learned a lot here and still learning a lot with every visit. we cross inspire each other and that's just awesome :thumbup:

twg said:
Do you have a favourite type of moss to work with Viktor? I've only ever used Java and would be interested to see if you had any preference to one particular type. For it's shape, growing habits etc?

In soft water most of the mosses act and looks differently. they looks much better. around this time i love chrismas moss and weeping as they looks lovely bushy with great texture. but fissidens is one of my all time fav and i still did not had a chance to use riccardia which is a must have for me. of course there are many other mosses out there but these are my favs for sure.

nowadays i've more into to use mosses on the ground rather than the woods. so many possibilities and shapes, but not enough time to play all out. ;)

George Farmer said:
This is one of the best I've seen from you/GA - it's beautiful on many levels.
The fine textures of the mosses and stems make it look so inviting - sumptuous!
You guys are really living the dream with having the opportunity to aquascape and share your passion on such a great level. It's really awe-inspiring.
Thanks for sharing, and keep up the wonderful work. :thumbup:

Thanks my friend, we have really good masters here. Without them (including you of course) it would be much harder. I can't be enough appreciated for all the great knowledge and inspiration what we've gained here in the past years. :thumbup:

Antoni said:
Thanks for the info on softenizer, Victor! That is the best way to know how something works, is it good for use and what issues may arise - unprofessional attitude It will be appreciated if you could share your experience so far, regarding cleaning, time the resin lasts etc..

On softenizer...
Resin change could happen in every 2 month or so. What i've seen after a time the resin get stucked not floating that much. I bet if we would measure the water the water parameters would reflect this too. As at the beggining the resin is super light easy to float in the glass.

The softnenizer is hooked to the filter pipe all accessories included with more then enough resin in the basic package. So you will have enough to change it later meanwhile you recharge the resin in salt water.

You can turn on off or fine adjust the water pressure in the tube. So this is easy to set the desired floating with that.

5384106612_bfa5d6dc0a_b.jpg


For first sight i thougth the glass cleaning will be the hardest part, but there are other stuffs too. For example as the clean hose gets the water from the filter the hose will have algae after a time. which you could not clean. We had to replace after 2 month, but this is only a silicone tube like an air hose so this is not an issue.

At water changes you need to close the filter head otherwise the vacum will suck the resin back to the filter.

Cleaning the glass is ok, however you need the tiny fine brush from ADA to clean the softenizer inlet. That part is the most sensitive part of the softenizer so need to handle carefully at cleaning.

Other than that this works like a charm. Nice eye catching piece, to clean the glass is as much effort as a filter glass pipe.

Antoni said:
With no intention to hijack the topic... I'm really interested what is causing this swing in the pH. IMO a reason could be the low kH of the RO water, which lacks a buffer capacity if it has value under 4-5. But probably the substrate is playing role here too. As far as I''m aware the Malaya is lowering kH and pH most of all Aquasoil substrates, so this could be the major player for the swing and that is why you are experiencing this in this tank only.

You're right because of the full RO water the KH and GH is low. This lack of buffer capacity, so we need to be careful and measure the water parameters at WC. We never had problems only one time on one of the tanks. Other than that we did not had buffering problems.

We're using Amazonia in that pH swing tank. Probably KH was around 3 when the pH made the trick.

Antoni said:
Just out of curiosity, what the pH of the tank with the hemianthus is?

HC Iwagumi tank pH is higher because the water hardness is more there. We have around 25-30Kg of stones there which plays a big role in hardness. For this reason pH is around 6.8-7 usually there.

Antoni said:
I'm really interested to know, how phosphate based buffer such as Seachem Neutral Regulator increases pH,

well i am sure the scientific heads will answer this easily like Clive, Darell, Tom i am just a planthead here. :p
but works like a charm and super quick. i thought after the initial increase the pH will drop again because of the buffering capacity but the tanks were pretty stable after the use. since then we used it with shrimp tanks and other plant tanks too. no negative effect on any species and you really see all the species calmed and relaxed if the pH was down before.
 
Back
Top