Wham-bam-shazamm!

[K.J.]

Well, I have another project. Heh, this time it's my other 10 G that I was given by a person who also has a free 100G. Unfortunately. my room is bad enough as it is. But anywho; this tank will be running on just one kit filter, because it wad four options: 2 bettas, being divided, betta sorority tank, guppy tank, or corydora tank. I'm leaning towards transferring my four peppers from the other 10G to this and adding another, and then adding a floating trap to the other tank and raising a couple of misplaced fry I would like to see at the pet shop grow up. I might take the platies back, even though the female might be pregnant because I have a newfound fascination with guppies. The corydora would also be a great option because it has very fine white sand. Though this is a prejournal why? I still have to cycle it. The old shop that had my ammonia closed down and now all we can find is stuff with soap. I GUESS we could order it. But, now to pictures:

It's going to be low tech planted. Probably using compact fluorescent or regular incandescent, which is better? I think I had better go with incandescent, for I'm not going with co2 and compacts will give me far too much light. The plants will probably mostly be java moss, java fern, anubias and maybe some crypts or wisteria. Lots of rocks and driftwood..

 

[lljdma06]

Don't use incandescent, the heat production is too great and it doesn't effectively grow plants. CFs are better, but you'll have lighting gaps. Just keep that in mind when you plant, plant the lower light plants where the gaps are. If you really, really want to go low-tech, or low-light, a standard 20' fluorescent strip light is less than $20 and comes with a 15W T8, which is 1.5WPG. Very low-light for a 10g, but you'll be able to easily grow anubias, crypts, java fern, and possibly some hardy stemplants (Egeria). You can create a nice scape if you've got the right pieces of wood or rocks. Consider a sand substrate with a nutrient-rich layer underneath if you like the idea of keeping cories. Though I find that my cories do just as well on 1-3mm gravel, which is essentially large-grain sand, but compacts far less than standard sand. I've injected CO2 in tanks with as little as 1.4WPG and find that it helps. Keeping the levels up, however, are not as critical.

llj

 

[K.J.]

I'm mostly thinking of just doing java ferns. They do fine in my betta tanks, although grow slowly. This is going to be as low tech as possible as I'm on a budget of... not very much, between catfood, birdfood, fishfood, and the expenses of my other tank. For the light, is there anything cheap but not supplying too much light? I really can't afford to spend too much, and I'm considering just going plastic with this... we'll see how it goes.