kamber
Fish Fanatic
It arrived a while ago, i've not had a chance to do a post for a while as i've been busy.
Anyway..here goes....after being sent the wrong colour! I was so annoyed as i had taken time off work to be at home for the delivery. I got it in the front room (damn thing is heavy with nothing in it!), opened to check it and, bam its beech, i ordered black...anyway i sent it back with the delivery guy and got another one sent out to me within 3 days so it wasnt too bad. While i was waiting for this to arrive i had already got a fluval 405 and got that running on my existing tank with some mature media in there to get it kick started.
Got the space ready for it and started to built the base...
All built up on the base in position..
Added 65 kilos of black fine gravel (all painstakingly washed) and a background. I was going to use the rock side of this background but the missus was taken with this side, so this side it was!
The next few hours were spent with buckets of water, i use a 10 litre buckets as i find this a nice size and its rougly 2 gallons so i know the exact amount of water conditioner to add to this + its easy to lift around the house without spilling everywhere. Water warmed around 22-25c to avoid waiting hours for the heater to warm up ice cold water.
roughly 10 buckets in...
20ish buckets in...
40ish buckets in... and getting knackered by now
45 buckets and aprox 450 litres later Its finally full... I added some big bits of bog wood a fake plant (right) and some live plants (left) made some caves out of slate, added a 1200/lph power head and setup the fluval 405 external filter, i also got a jumbo filter sponge that was run in from a friend and added that to the internal jumbo filters sponge rack... finally rather than just dump a whole load of big fish in i bought some black neons, some orange barbs and some harlequins (all of which excluding the barbs are now in the tank in my kitchen) to get some fish waste in there and let the new substrate get established.
I had added stress zyme filter booster as well at this point and had been "feeding" the tank. 0 ammo, 0 nitrite, very low nitrate 10ppm, PH 6.6 (due to the bog wood). The neons, barbs and the harlequins we're loving it. The harlequins formed a nice shoal and swam all round the tank i added 10 more harlequins and checked the water stats again afew a few days continually overfeeding with prawn. no ammonia (there wouldn't be a hazardous reading anyway at this ph as its in its non toxic form below ph 7), 0 nitrite and 10-20ppm fluctuating nitrate. Happy the bacteria were doing there job i slowly added more fish (some from the existing tank) and some new ones later.
When i added a few more fish from my existing tank i moved the EX1200 over to this tank as well.
Its now running with the fluval jumbo internal filter, a fluval 405 external (with extra biomax media, i removed the badly fitting carbon they supply with this model), a tetratec EX1200 external. Slightly over filtered i know, but i have a few big fish in there now and i prefer to over filter anyway.
It looks nothing like the pics above now as i've rescaped it and move everything around. There is an ocean rock centre peice and a huge 13"x6" slate cave (for the sailfin plec) to the right of that next to the filter, pretty much there the grey reedfish cave is on the pic above. I removed the real plants as well as these were getting dug up and getting bits in the water. I will post some current pics in a bit when its day light (yes its 5am and i'm posting on here lol... well i couldn't sleep
Heres a pic from the other week (when the live plants were still in there) the cave is on the right...
Theres silver sharks a RTBS and an SAE and the tinfoil barb on the right (like you can miss him!)
The harlequins have there new home in the kitchen now with the live plants
There is a stingray internal filter in there (although not shown on this pic)
There you have it! more pics of the fish from this tank currently and my other tank to follow.
Anyway..here goes....after being sent the wrong colour! I was so annoyed as i had taken time off work to be at home for the delivery. I got it in the front room (damn thing is heavy with nothing in it!), opened to check it and, bam its beech, i ordered black...anyway i sent it back with the delivery guy and got another one sent out to me within 3 days so it wasnt too bad. While i was waiting for this to arrive i had already got a fluval 405 and got that running on my existing tank with some mature media in there to get it kick started.
Got the space ready for it and started to built the base...
All built up on the base in position..
Added 65 kilos of black fine gravel (all painstakingly washed) and a background. I was going to use the rock side of this background but the missus was taken with this side, so this side it was!
The next few hours were spent with buckets of water, i use a 10 litre buckets as i find this a nice size and its rougly 2 gallons so i know the exact amount of water conditioner to add to this + its easy to lift around the house without spilling everywhere. Water warmed around 22-25c to avoid waiting hours for the heater to warm up ice cold water.
roughly 10 buckets in...
20ish buckets in...
40ish buckets in... and getting knackered by now
45 buckets and aprox 450 litres later Its finally full... I added some big bits of bog wood a fake plant (right) and some live plants (left) made some caves out of slate, added a 1200/lph power head and setup the fluval 405 external filter, i also got a jumbo filter sponge that was run in from a friend and added that to the internal jumbo filters sponge rack... finally rather than just dump a whole load of big fish in i bought some black neons, some orange barbs and some harlequins (all of which excluding the barbs are now in the tank in my kitchen) to get some fish waste in there and let the new substrate get established.
I had added stress zyme filter booster as well at this point and had been "feeding" the tank. 0 ammo, 0 nitrite, very low nitrate 10ppm, PH 6.6 (due to the bog wood). The neons, barbs and the harlequins we're loving it. The harlequins formed a nice shoal and swam all round the tank i added 10 more harlequins and checked the water stats again afew a few days continually overfeeding with prawn. no ammonia (there wouldn't be a hazardous reading anyway at this ph as its in its non toxic form below ph 7), 0 nitrite and 10-20ppm fluctuating nitrate. Happy the bacteria were doing there job i slowly added more fish (some from the existing tank) and some new ones later.
When i added a few more fish from my existing tank i moved the EX1200 over to this tank as well.
Its now running with the fluval jumbo internal filter, a fluval 405 external (with extra biomax media, i removed the badly fitting carbon they supply with this model), a tetratec EX1200 external. Slightly over filtered i know, but i have a few big fish in there now and i prefer to over filter anyway.
It looks nothing like the pics above now as i've rescaped it and move everything around. There is an ocean rock centre peice and a huge 13"x6" slate cave (for the sailfin plec) to the right of that next to the filter, pretty much there the grey reedfish cave is on the pic above. I removed the real plants as well as these were getting dug up and getting bits in the water. I will post some current pics in a bit when its day light (yes its 5am and i'm posting on here lol... well i couldn't sleep
Heres a pic from the other week (when the live plants were still in there) the cave is on the right...
Theres silver sharks a RTBS and an SAE and the tinfoil barb on the right (like you can miss him!)
The harlequins have there new home in the kitchen now with the live plants
There is a stingray internal filter in there (although not shown on this pic)
There you have it! more pics of the fish from this tank currently and my other tank to follow.
