oldwhitewood
Member
- Joined
- 11 Jul 2007
- Messages
- 356
Ok here is a step by step of my new layout. As you may know I've been running a tank using the same equipment for about a year and a half now, but I'd become a bit bored and frustrated with the old layout and wanted to try something different. There were a couple of reasons for this. mainly the tank had become very unruly and overgrown, and also I'd moved the tank from my house to my parents to my new apartment so you can imagine it was a little worse for wear in terms of design...not however in terms of condition. There is certainly something to say for the longevity of setups using aquasoil and powersand, this has been the longest planted tank I have ever maintained without it becoming completely wrecked, so it was a bit of a milestone for me. However I think I need to challenge myself a bit more, as I still don't feel 100% confident in what I'm doing and I wanted to improve my skills with maintaining something long term with a tricky trimming routine, so after much deliberation I decided to try a planted foreground again, something which I hadn't done for about two years. I also decided to use my favorite foreground plant, echinodorus tenellus which is quite contrary to what I've been reading on here, most people don't use if for foregrounds because it grows too tall but it's been something I'd wanted to try for a while now.
The first thing I did was to setup a temp holding tank for the inhabitants, which at this stage were around 10 large shrimp and a small shoal of Neon Tetras, probably about 1 otto left in there too. I had to mature the tank and then move the plants and inhabitants in there of course, the process of which is well documented elsewhere so I won't go into the details, suffice to say they're all fine so far. Anyway with the tank drained I obtained a 9L bag of Aqua Soil Malaya, "why not Amazonia?" I hear you cry! Well my plan was to remove the sand foreground and fill in with Malaya which I already had in the tank anyway, but after a chat with my friend Luis (his tank is the one I put on the aquascapes thread) we reckoned it best to remove all the aquasoil and expose the powersand underneath, then re-create the top layer of aquasoil from scratch. This is what I did and the following pictures should show that process. NB I wont go into explaining how to use powersand special and tourmaline BC as again it's well documented elsewhere.
The first thing I did was to setup a temp holding tank for the inhabitants, which at this stage were around 10 large shrimp and a small shoal of Neon Tetras, probably about 1 otto left in there too. I had to mature the tank and then move the plants and inhabitants in there of course, the process of which is well documented elsewhere so I won't go into the details, suffice to say they're all fine so far. Anyway with the tank drained I obtained a 9L bag of Aqua Soil Malaya, "why not Amazonia?" I hear you cry! Well my plan was to remove the sand foreground and fill in with Malaya which I already had in the tank anyway, but after a chat with my friend Luis (his tank is the one I put on the aquascapes thread) we reckoned it best to remove all the aquasoil and expose the powersand underneath, then re-create the top layer of aquasoil from scratch. This is what I did and the following pictures should show that process. NB I wont go into explaining how to use powersand special and tourmaline BC as again it's well documented elsewhere.