Cavalier_Steve
Member
Hello everyone, welcome to my first journal,
I wasn’t going to write about my first planted aquarium, but I think I have enough pictures to give a good story to how this progressed so I thought why not!
Back in October 2015 I see a tank that I liked for the money, my wife wanted to buy me it towards my Christmas.
The tank was an off the shelf model and is a Fish ‘R’ Fun brand, model FRF-585 it’s been a great little tank the lamp lasted a good 4 years before failing I have somewhat customised the filter over this time nothing drastic just added some bio media and replaced the filter floss, standard maintenance really.
This was my first planted tank I didn’t really know much at the time about aquarium plants, (still got lots of learning to do) But it was the start of something that’s grown more on me.
This is what it looked like when I first put it together back in October 2015 no live stock at this time as I was cycling the tank with pure ammonia correctly measured out to kick start the beneficial bacteria.
Fun fact: I still have the bog wood and the Anubis and maybe 1 or 2 others but I’m not sure.
Eventually I put my 2 gold fish in there from my Fluval chi, I had these 2 gold fish from when they was a baby from my mums pond they was slightly smaller than a neon tetra.
Then in the summer I felt it wasn’t right to keep the fish in the tank and as the pond temperature was up I thought it was the right time to acclimate them back to the pond. It was then I started back to having tropical fish like I did back in my teenage years.
Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures worth showing between then and April 2021 a couple of baby guppy’s that been born in the tank.
My plant growth was never great mainly due to my lack of knowledge, fertiliser’s and most importantly CO2 back in 2019 I tried a diy CO2 method mainly due to lack of money I purchased a kit that you can convert 2 2 litres bottles into a homemade system using the bicarbonate soda and Citric acid, because I had both of these ingredients available to me and I liked the setup. What a mistake that was! The system worked only to well I came home from work and found all my fish had died due to the needle valve was letting to much CO2 past, I was absolutely gutted and annoyed with myself to the point I nearly shut the whole thing down, but I carried on, this time I just used the CO2 booster liquid and bought some more fish after exchanging the water just to be sure.
Everything was back to its usual self.
This photo was taken on the 1st April 2021 where I re-homed 7 fish for a friend that didn’t want to keep there tank anymore.
More to come, I don’t want to overload my first post with information and pictures.
I wasn’t going to write about my first planted aquarium, but I think I have enough pictures to give a good story to how this progressed so I thought why not!
Back in October 2015 I see a tank that I liked for the money, my wife wanted to buy me it towards my Christmas.
The tank was an off the shelf model and is a Fish ‘R’ Fun brand, model FRF-585 it’s been a great little tank the lamp lasted a good 4 years before failing I have somewhat customised the filter over this time nothing drastic just added some bio media and replaced the filter floss, standard maintenance really.
This was my first planted tank I didn’t really know much at the time about aquarium plants, (still got lots of learning to do) But it was the start of something that’s grown more on me.
This is what it looked like when I first put it together back in October 2015 no live stock at this time as I was cycling the tank with pure ammonia correctly measured out to kick start the beneficial bacteria.
Fun fact: I still have the bog wood and the Anubis and maybe 1 or 2 others but I’m not sure.
Eventually I put my 2 gold fish in there from my Fluval chi, I had these 2 gold fish from when they was a baby from my mums pond they was slightly smaller than a neon tetra.
Then in the summer I felt it wasn’t right to keep the fish in the tank and as the pond temperature was up I thought it was the right time to acclimate them back to the pond. It was then I started back to having tropical fish like I did back in my teenage years.
Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures worth showing between then and April 2021 a couple of baby guppy’s that been born in the tank.
My plant growth was never great mainly due to my lack of knowledge, fertiliser’s and most importantly CO2 back in 2019 I tried a diy CO2 method mainly due to lack of money I purchased a kit that you can convert 2 2 litres bottles into a homemade system using the bicarbonate soda and Citric acid, because I had both of these ingredients available to me and I liked the setup. What a mistake that was! The system worked only to well I came home from work and found all my fish had died due to the needle valve was letting to much CO2 past, I was absolutely gutted and annoyed with myself to the point I nearly shut the whole thing down, but I carried on, this time I just used the CO2 booster liquid and bought some more fish after exchanging the water just to be sure.
Everything was back to its usual self.
This photo was taken on the 1st April 2021 where I re-homed 7 fish for a friend that didn’t want to keep there tank anymore.
More to come, I don’t want to overload my first post with information and pictures.