Corbie
Member
I recently joined the forum as part of my process of learning about water parameters (see post under Water Chemistry). Although I've been keeping fish and plants nigh on 50 years I've been stuck in the old ways for so long and only in the last year or two have I tried to catch up with technology. So I'm posting a few pics here to document my learning process, good or bad.
I currently only have one aquarium, which is 5 feet long by 1 foot, and about 14 inches high, so I guess that qualifies as a long shallow. It has been running, pretty much unchanged apart from occasionally adding fish or plants, for 29 years now. Before that I dabbled with marine. I have two Fluval G3 external filters, with ceramic media, and at the moment each has an activated carbon cartridge but usually these just contain bio media. The substrate is 30 year old "aquarium gravel" as it used to be called 😀, small rounded pebbles, mixed with sharp sand and mulm, about 2 inches deep. The heater is a 300w visitherm. I keep the water at just over 26 degrees C.
I've always kept the tank quite heavily planted as I love plants. The bi-product of this is that I've never really had a problem with algae. However I've found that the plants don't do all that well. They tend to last a year or so, gradually declining. So I've resolved to try and improve my education in this respect, especially seeing all the fantastic aquascapes here and on youtube. Wow! Some of those are amazing.
So here is the baseline. I started, many, many years ago, trying to replicate a Rio Negro / Amazon blackwater tank, before it was really a thing- I used to be a professional ecologist. I soon modified this a bit when I realised that many of the fish there don't really live in planted areas, apart from mangrove trees; it's mostly deeply-stained water with dead wood and leaves. So it became an Amazonish tank, with whatever South American plants I could find, and Rio Negro fish. The tap water here has always been very soft and pH around neutral. In the 1970s when I first started keeping fish, the advice was waaaaay different from what it is now! Water changes 25% every 3 months or so.... leave it to become "aged water". I was quite lucky, and my tanks found their own balance and happily ran along on their own cycles for months or years. Nutrients were removed by occasional syphoning of mulm and removal of overgrown plants. Amazon plants were sometimes difficult to find and so over the years it became less of a biotope, with Cryptocorynes and North American plants creeping in. Also, when my daughters were growing up I let them choose fish, and these were sometimes not South American. I don't have a photo of my 5 foot tank from years back I'm afraid, but here it is a few weeks ago before I started on the new learning drive.
Fish inhabitants are black widows, neon tetras, glowlight tetras, 1 remaining very old black tetra, 3 very old scissortails, a black molly and couple of platies. Yes I know the latter are supposed to be hard water fish but they happily breed away here and have done so for a few years.
You might notice drop indicators at each end- newly installed, as the first stage in improving things, is a CO2 regulator, running off a 600g welding cylinder, with diffusers at the right hand end and in the centre, immediately below the two filter inputs. But the photo was taken just after installation. The lights are 8 x Aquaray strip LEDs, which have been in place for a few years. Roughly 10 hours duration plus an hour ramping up and down.
Now here are some pics from today, around a month later. The CO2 seems to have made a difference already:
I think it can probably stand a little bit more CO2 than it's currently set for. The current drive to learn was prompted by our water company drastically changing the water parameters recently, which has resulted in an increased amount of nutrients in the water and a higher pH. So I have now invested in a reverse osmosis kit, and I've spent the last few weeks doing smallish water changes with R/O water, and have now brought back to TDS to a reasonable level. Fish and plants don't seem to have suffered from the spike. I'll continue trying to bring the stats down a bit more. I want to start trying using the Estimated Index method, so have ordered the various chemicals. I'll post again here once I've got started with that. I've also ordered some Otocinclus affinis.
I currently only have one aquarium, which is 5 feet long by 1 foot, and about 14 inches high, so I guess that qualifies as a long shallow. It has been running, pretty much unchanged apart from occasionally adding fish or plants, for 29 years now. Before that I dabbled with marine. I have two Fluval G3 external filters, with ceramic media, and at the moment each has an activated carbon cartridge but usually these just contain bio media. The substrate is 30 year old "aquarium gravel" as it used to be called 😀, small rounded pebbles, mixed with sharp sand and mulm, about 2 inches deep. The heater is a 300w visitherm. I keep the water at just over 26 degrees C.
I've always kept the tank quite heavily planted as I love plants. The bi-product of this is that I've never really had a problem with algae. However I've found that the plants don't do all that well. They tend to last a year or so, gradually declining. So I've resolved to try and improve my education in this respect, especially seeing all the fantastic aquascapes here and on youtube. Wow! Some of those are amazing.
So here is the baseline. I started, many, many years ago, trying to replicate a Rio Negro / Amazon blackwater tank, before it was really a thing- I used to be a professional ecologist. I soon modified this a bit when I realised that many of the fish there don't really live in planted areas, apart from mangrove trees; it's mostly deeply-stained water with dead wood and leaves. So it became an Amazonish tank, with whatever South American plants I could find, and Rio Negro fish. The tap water here has always been very soft and pH around neutral. In the 1970s when I first started keeping fish, the advice was waaaaay different from what it is now! Water changes 25% every 3 months or so.... leave it to become "aged water". I was quite lucky, and my tanks found their own balance and happily ran along on their own cycles for months or years. Nutrients were removed by occasional syphoning of mulm and removal of overgrown plants. Amazon plants were sometimes difficult to find and so over the years it became less of a biotope, with Cryptocorynes and North American plants creeping in. Also, when my daughters were growing up I let them choose fish, and these were sometimes not South American. I don't have a photo of my 5 foot tank from years back I'm afraid, but here it is a few weeks ago before I started on the new learning drive.
Fish inhabitants are black widows, neon tetras, glowlight tetras, 1 remaining very old black tetra, 3 very old scissortails, a black molly and couple of platies. Yes I know the latter are supposed to be hard water fish but they happily breed away here and have done so for a few years.
You might notice drop indicators at each end- newly installed, as the first stage in improving things, is a CO2 regulator, running off a 600g welding cylinder, with diffusers at the right hand end and in the centre, immediately below the two filter inputs. But the photo was taken just after installation. The lights are 8 x Aquaray strip LEDs, which have been in place for a few years. Roughly 10 hours duration plus an hour ramping up and down.
Now here are some pics from today, around a month later. The CO2 seems to have made a difference already:
I think it can probably stand a little bit more CO2 than it's currently set for. The current drive to learn was prompted by our water company drastically changing the water parameters recently, which has resulted in an increased amount of nutrients in the water and a higher pH. So I have now invested in a reverse osmosis kit, and I've spent the last few weeks doing smallish water changes with R/O water, and have now brought back to TDS to a reasonable level. Fish and plants don't seem to have suffered from the spike. I'll continue trying to bring the stats down a bit more. I want to start trying using the Estimated Index method, so have ordered the various chemicals. I'll post again here once I've got started with that. I've also ordered some Otocinclus affinis.
the problem with getting cutters in to clear the stuff is they have to clear all the windblown on the way to the specific windblown tree that is blocking your access, it takes bloody ages for rural areas.
