Thanks. It's been a pretty fun system to get up and going. It took several months to stabilize, but it really is pretty easy maintenance. I never have to clean glass or deal with algae. Mostly it's dumping about a half quart of floating plants every week, and trim about once a month. I set up the water with an auto-topoff from a 40 gal rubbermaid bucket outside. I fill it from the creek and it has a float valve into what we call "the bandit lair". This is just a 10 gal tank in the sump area that houses 3 troublesome amanos.
Full grown Amanos will absolutely take cherry shrimp and small fish when they are berried and need extra protein, so they live in the 10. The 10g has a topoff pump that fills into the pump chamber of the sump. I can basically do frequent 5-10 gal water changes by just siphoning from the main tank and letting it fill on its own from the reservoir.
Plants have been trial and error, but I think I have it pretty settled. I am working on getting the crypt parva spread everywhere in the foreground. I don't do any CO2 or dosing, but everything seems to be pretty healthy.
A more recent addition has been kuhli loaches. There are 7 and they love the setup. They seem to "live" under the giant rock, but come out all the time and chuff through the substrate getting whatever lives there. I have noticed that they have kept some of the aquatic worm population in check. Those guys would make piles of silt all over the place and it seems to be much less now. I am fine with that because it tended to bury the parva a bit. I'll try and post a bit more often.
