My New Tank Diary...

[james_fish]

As some of you may know, I was in the process of planning a new setup. That setup is now becoming reality.

The reason for this post is to show you how im getting on and prompt you to give me any advice you can offer throughout the months of setting it up fully.

James



Day 1 - Purchased the tank from my LFS and returned home. The tank game with a U4 internal filter (1000lph) a Heater, lights & the usual treatments and complimentary food.

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Got it up the stairs and in the bedroom!​

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After about an hour of faffing around I managed to assemble the cabinet and put the tank on. Then called it a night as it was getting late.​

[sub]Note my current tank (60l), some of my fish looking on at there new home. 60L to be re-located. [/sub]​

Day 2 - Woke up to a brand new tank! What a feeling. Got a long way to go yet though.
My plan for the day was to wash my gravel and clean some old bogwood I was given by a insider from pets.
I also had a fiddle with my filter and got it set up

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The first stages of cleaning, look how dirty the water is!​

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The bogwood. What I did was put it in a bucket of boiling water let it soke for around 10 minutes. Then i sprayed it with the hose outside. I will do the same for the next couple of days.​

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One of the final cleans. After about 5 it was becoming usable. I will now leave it to soak for a couple of days and probably put it in my tank by the weekend with the addition of the water.​

Day 3 - Today I did another wash on my gravel to be on the safest side. I also did the same with my bogwood as I did previously.
With all that out of the way, I had a little play around with the filter, lights and heater. Pretty good peices of kit if you ask me!
Im more than likely to put my water and gravel in my tank tomorrow.

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Just setting the lights up! Pretty simple really but they look really good.​

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Latest tank photo, including the heater, filter and lighting. Thinking about getting a background as my walls look boring. What do you think?​

Day 4 - Today I did the main part of the setup - Adding the water.
Firstly I placed the washed gravel in my tank in a near level manner. Then I positioned my filter and heater in likely places.
After that I fed my hose pipe through my window and began to fill the tank, took me around 5 minutes to get it to my desired water line.
Then bang, electicity on, bobs your uncle, let there be light!
Then I positioned the cleaned bog-wood and a couple of statues in the tank just for temporary deco!

My tank lit with the added features! Still some air bubbles on the back pane from the fill up!​

Days 4 & 5 - My tank is now settling and cycling now. So this topic will be quiet soon. I did take the time out to take a latest photograph for you guys, I also decided to start cleaning another piece of bogwood as my tank will look bare once ready!

Latest tank photo, note I removed the plant after some advice I was given. You can also see some new rocks I added on the left ​

My pleco was getting so exited with its new home, I had to calm it down with some cucumber! [sub]Glowlight Tetra in background [/sub]​

 

[Ferg1985]

Nice tank! Looking forward to keeping an eye on the journal!

 

[waterdrop]

Wish Oliver's room had had enough space for a bigger one like that. Looks like its going to be fun! --WD

 

[james_fish]

Thanks Ferg! I can't wait till its up and running fully.

Yeah, WD. In order to fit it in to my room I had to get rid of my corner unit which was huge! It means I have no CD/DVD rack. No TV & no PS3!

But IMHO, i'd rather watch a fish tank than a television

James.

 

[james_fish]

I need to decide when to add live plants once my tank is up and running. I've heard many different times: 2,4,6,8+ weeks. What are your thoughts?

James.

 

[waterdrop]

Hi James,

There are lots of different ways you can go about the startup of having plants and planning that into the startup of a good tank. Underneath it all is the fact that a lot of it is personal choice and, unlike cycling for instance, you are pretty free to try different things without experiencing too much fall-out.

If its just you and not a family trying to satisfy little kids, its a bit easier to choose a "bare cycle" or even a "blacked out cycle" where you wrap the tank with double-black-plastic garbage bag or such and keep light out for most of the time of the cycle so that you don't get algae hopefully. Algae is triggered by light and the small amounts of ammonia we put in for cycling (actually algae can be triggered by amounts less than our test kits can measure, but that's a different story.)

Or, you can choose a bunch of cheap plants with the understanding that you'll just throw them out after the cycle if they are covered with algae.

Or, you can not worry about all this and just decide to start trying to grow some plants -during- the cycle. One thing I do recommend though is not to -heavily- plant during a fishless cycle, as that makes it much harder to read your testing results and understand them.

Learning about plants is an ongoing conversation...

~~waterdrop~~

 

[james_fish]

Thanks Waterdrop. I really would like to get some small plants for when I add my first fish in a few weeks time. The tank is being entirely designed by me, and it will be me who will be waking up to it every morning! I will probably buy a couple of cheapys for the time being. Or I could introduce some plants from my current? They are only small/cheap plants.

Thanks, James

 

[waterdrop]

What's your total light wattage and are they T5 or T8 diameter?

 

[james_fish]

Ermm...[sub] (shoots upstairs to find out)[/sub]

They are both 30 watts. And yes they are T-8 diameter.

James.

 

[waterdrop]

ok, (opens windows calculator), 200L/53G tank... 60watts T8... 60/53... 1.13 watts/USgallon... Great! That's right where you want to be (usually, as a beginner) for standard Low-Light Technique in the planted world. This is where you choose slow growth plants (anubias, java ferns, java moss, crypt wendtii, amazon swords, hygrophila? help me here members...) and by lighting the tank for 8 hours (maybe 6 or even 4 hours at the very start but slowly working back up if there's not an algae problem) in one photoperiod (or 2 periods as long as each is a miniumum of 4 hours) you "drive" the growth process without too much push or quickness. Too much light intensity and your tank will quickly get out of control in terms of algae and plants using up their nutrients too fast. Speaking of nutrients, there are 17 that are necessary for plants (Non-mineral nutrients: C, H, O, (from water and air), All the rest are Minerals, Primary-Macronutrients: N, P, K, Secondary-macronutrients: Ca, Mg, S, and Mineral-micronutrients: iron (Fe), manganese (Mn), zinc (Zn), boron (B), copper (Cu), chloride (Cl), molybdenum (Mo), and nickel (Ni). The way it works is that if plants run out of any nutrient they need, that nutrient becomes the limiting factor, the plant exhibits some bad symptom (yellow leaves, brown edges, death etc. ) and some or all of the remaining nutrients become excess and are availble for use by algae! Got it !

So getting the right nutrients to the plants becomes an interesting problem in the hobby. In a low-light tank it may be that if you have enough fish, they and their excess leftover fishfood will provide enough of most of these nutrients because all of these elements are contained in organic debris. But it could also be that there will not be enough of a few of the nutrients. And if we decide to dose some fertilizers to ensure enough nutrients then we might start to get too much of something that would hurt the fish.. so what do we do? Well, there's a cool system out there called Estimative Index ("EI" for short) and "reduced EI" for us low-light technique people and what it sort of boils down to is that you make sure you are dosing more than enough (in the right ratios to each other, so you don't waste money) of each of the nutrients during each week and then at the end of the week you do a large water change to ensure that all the nutrient levels go way back down below what the plants want and you start dosing again. This dovetails very nicely with the healthy weekly water change habit that keeps heavy metals and weird organics from ever building up and killing our fish!

All sounds nice and neat and easy, right? Well, the very first nutrient I mentioned, C (Carbon), is a troublemaker! Its absolutely essential, being the universal bendable backbone (so to speak) for all organic molecules that make up us and the plants and life.. so we gotta have it, but its trouble. Among other things, its the backbone in sugars and we all know the simple sugars carry the energy throughout living things so that the cells have fuel to burn and do things. So the plant is going to be crying out for sugar (just like your kid, right?) on a daily basis. Getting Carbon to an underwater plant is just a big pain. There are currently 4 ways:
1) Do nothing but keep the surface moving and hope the water absorbs enough CO2.
2) Get some plastic soda bottles and build a DIY fermentation factory and fuss, well, hey, its like making homemade beer.
3) Lay out hundreds of $/pounds, get a form of scuba training and "go pressurized" with a CO2 tank a regulator.
4) Put the money out more slowly by purchasing bottles of "liquid carbon" and doing daily special carbon dosing.

In summary, this is why I often say that for plants.. light is a skillset, nutrients are a skillset, CO2 is a skillset and Algae? Well algae is a skillset that requires you to already understand some of the previous skillsets! This is how I like to think about the plant thing, but I'm a detail person and in truth, its usually not so hard to have good plants if you just put some effort into finding out things. In the UK you can just get some Tropica TPN+, some EasyCarbo liquid carbon, a cheap lamp timer for your light and the right plants and you are in business!

~~waterdrop~~

 

[james_fish]

Thankyou for your advice and im sure expertise.
If you see Day 4, I have added the single plant from my 13 Gallon. Its been a good servent in there and has grown a decent length since purchase. Will this be okay in there for the time being if I stick to the light time regime?

Thanks, James.

 

[waterdrop]

Well you've had good luck before so maybe it will go ok now just as is (I always think you UK folks usually have better water than us anyway, lol)

I guess my technical answer would be that if you haven't already dosed the tank with a full set of nutrients and provided some carbon prior to putting a new plants in then often the sterile environment of a brand new fishless cycling tank will kill the plant. If you limit the light to 4 hours and dose some ferts and carbon then it might not only do ok but you might limit the amount of algae you get (although algae is a chance thing anyway since a given tank of water might or might not have algae spores in it!) The plant looks like elodea, the most common aquarium stem plant out there (pretty hardy, which is good.)

~~waterdrop~~

 

[james_fish]

In that case, I will return the plant to my 13 gal. I will either go out later and buy some nutrients or I will allow the tank to cycle for another week or two before re-adding it.

James.

 

[james_fish]

Post updated, any stocking suggestions for when my tank is ready?

James

 

[waterdrop]

Well if people turn out to have any interest in them I always like to recommend looking at Rasbora Heteromorpha (Harlequins) as their orangy/pink colorations are so unusual and they shoal nicely and I've decided they are even more hardy than zebra danios for beginners. They are just an all-round great fish. WD