New Member With Pics + Vid Of My 125g Planted Tank

[Bearfish]

Hi everyone,

I'm new here and wanted to share some pictures of my 125 gallon tank. I 've always had silk/plastic plants with fake rocks and fish for many years. A few months ago I bought a few live plants and just stuck em in the tank. I was smart enough to know to buy low light plants. After adding the live plants there was just no comparison to the fake ones. The live plants looks awesome. So I went and bought a few more different ones, Anubas, Java Ferns etc.. The plants did great for a few weeks, then a few of them just fell apart and I was scooping leaves out of the top of the tank every night. Come to find out I only had regular old gravel in the tank and just adding fert/plant food wasn't enough to sustain the few plants I had. So I redid my substrate and put down a layer of Flourite then added my gravel on top. I bought a few new plants and upgraded my lighting system. The tank began to look 1000 times better already. So I added more and more plants...Bad idea. Soon the plants were sucking up all the O2 in the water leaving the fish gasping for air. I quickly did my homework on how CO2 systems work and put together my own fully automatic CO2 system, with basically the same parts as the one Fosters & Smith sells.

So here I am, I am now in my 2nd week of CO2 injection. Everything is rocking in rolling, many plants that were wilting are now blooming with color. And a few of the plants are growing like MAD! I have a few that actually grow more than an inch per day! Yesterday I did a little aquascaping and trimmed some of the plants down. I took some pictures today and have them posted below. There are a few bare spots in my background that I will fill in with some tall background plants this weekend. I'm taking it slow, waiting to see how each plant will grow and fill out in my tank before adding more.

Tank Info:
125g tank with fish & plants
Fully Automatic CO2 injection
Am: 0
Ni: 0
Na: 0
PH: 6.4
Temp: 84*

Here is a list of my Fish Stock:
Discus
Bolivian & German Rams
Electric Yellow Cichlids
Kribinesis
Clown Loaches
Barbs
Neon Tetras
Silver Hatchets
Guaramis
Pleco
Algea Eater
Brown Knife
Tire Track Eel

Here some pics, I also shot a video which can be found at the bottom:

Full tank picture:

Some of my Discus:

My Sunshine Pair:

Another shot of them, they are awesome to watch:

A shot showing some of the other fishies:

Here is a picture of my Eheim Filter:

This is my PH controller + 10lb bottle of C02:

Here is the plumbing for the CO2 system, Bubble Counter + Reactor:

Here is quick shot of my lights:

Here is the video, its 2 minutes long and is 28mb. If you have high speeds it will stream and play in about 1 minute. If you have a dial-up modem... uh.. your probably used to waiting then.

2min VIDEO (28mb) .mov file

Please ignore any sound in the video, hehe I had the TV on and my kids were just put in bed so you can hear their lullaby music too

Thanks for viewing!

Lee

 

[Mr Miagi]

Nice Tank! Gotta love duiscus!

 

[Sheridanp]

Beautiful tank, love it. Do you have any older pics to compare?

 

[Locke]

Wow- I'm impressed. Nice tank.

Welcome to the forums? (not sure if I should say that yet...?)

Take it easy.


SB

 

[Bearfish]

Beautiful tank, love it. Do you have any older pics to compare?

Here's a really old pic, I only had my rocks + a few silk plants.

I should have taken the planted tank pic with the "day light" lights off, you can really see how the light penetrates =)

 

[SiriusStarr]

Ohmigod, your discus are *gorgeous*!!! Beautiful ^^

 

[helsekia]

that is a reallt beautiful tank
your fish are beautiful
im soooooo jealous

 

[denis coghlan]

Great looking tank and I think that blue discus is just stunning looking!

How well do you labs do? Do they breed? I'm not having a go, Just asking because 6.4ph is very low for keeping mbuna species?

Welcome to the forum.

 

[Bearfish]

Thanks for the compliments everyone.

I have that tank in my living room, to left is the TV to the right is couch. So when your sitting on the couch watching TV, you have the tank to your right on the wall. I enjoy just laying on the couch (tv off) and just watching the fish, SOOOO relaxing.

Great looking tank and I think that blue discus is just stunning looking!

How well do you labs do? Do they breed? I'm not having a go, Just asking because 6.4ph is very low for keeping mbuna species?

Welcome to the forum.

The yellow labs are doing great! I bought 1 at first and added him to the tank to see how he would do and how aggressive he might be. I watched him for a couple weeks and he did great, never bothered a single thing and I could actually see him get bigger over the 2 weeks. I cannot believe how fast they grow. I added 4 more to the tank and it seems like they have doubled in size over a fews months time. The thing I like about the Yellows, is they are good tempered, they don't get huge only 4-5" or so and they are yellow!! Very hard to find a peaceful community fish they is as bright a yellow as they are. As far as breeding goes, thats really not my thing. I don't know anything about breeding or what conditions are needed to breed fish. If they did breed I wouldn't complain, but I don't know much about helping them get the job done hehe.