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Kyle3's 20g/75L Tank Reincarnation

6K views 45 replies 5 participants last post by  kyle3 
#1 · (Edited)
Hi all, I've decided the time has come to reincarnate my long running 20g/75L tank. I first bought this tank in 2004 and it has been evolving ever since. But I've decided to take it down to zero and start with a clean slate.

Here's how things are looking right now:
[Photo 1 @ the bottom of this post]

Here's my vision for the rebuild:
[Photo 2,3,4 @ the bottom of this post]
I'm planning to cap the soil with the old flourite that is in the tank now, in the planted corner sections of the tank. In the central open area I'd like to use Pool filter sand (PFS) but I haven't found any in a reasonable volume yet. I have found a material to use to make some "retaining walls" to keep my substrates somewhat separate. It's plastic corrugated board, however I could only find a HUGE piece of it so I'll have enough to do my next 100 tanks (LOL):
[Photo 5 @ the bottom of this post]

I also went beach combing for some driftwood that I boiled for MANY hours:
[Photo 6 @ the bottom of this post]

I've spent some time trying to decide how I'll arrange the pieces but I still need to decide how I'll secure them together. I've thought about using silicone, I've also thought about using screws on the thicker pieces and wiring the thiner ones to those . . . I'd love to hear any suggestions!

I've settled on my plant list, although I still need to find sources for them. (I'm hoping they'll pop up for sale on the forums here but I guess we'll see.) Here's the list:

foreground (low & bushing in the drawing): crypt. parva
mid-ground: mixed crypts (mostly wendtii)
on rocks and driftwood: low- anubias nana and coffeefolia/ high- moss (variety will depend on availability) and microsorum pteropus trident (needle leaf java)
background: crypt. spiralis and/or balanese

I've got some of this in the tank already and I'll plan to use what I have and add the other varieties as I can track them down.

I'm still undecided about fauna. The last fish I had in the tank were an eclectic mix that lived for years, I hadn't added any inhabitants since 2009 and the last fish, an 11 year-old oto, died about a year ago.

I'd like to have a very limited number of species so that I can maximize group size. My first idea was to have CRS and flame tetras. But I loved my otos, and I adored the cories and botia sidmunki that I had in the past so a group of one of them is very tempting . . . BUT I've become such a big fan of keeping the bioload light that I think I really will stick with the original plan. Can you tell I'm pretty undecided??? Ha! I'll figure it out in time I suppose :)

Other specs:
I have an Eheim heater that I'll continue to use.

Currently the tank has 2 Aquaclear HOBs, on 50 and 1 20 (the smaller one was once on my old shrimp tank.) I plan to purchase a canister filter sometime down the line (the other half doesn't like the sound of running water - who doesn't like peaceful white noise I ask you?!?) But I digress

I have a 20lb CO2 tank and basic GLA regulator, with a few cheap ceramic diffusers that I rotate in and out.

I have 2 30" coralife T-5 fixtures, (only using one right now) with a mix of 6700K and 10,000K bulbs.

Did I leave anything out? Am I planning something silly? I'd love to hear you thoughts and suggestions, I've missed this online community!
 

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#4 · (Edited)
Hi guys!
The mineralized soil process continues. I started because the weather had been warm and dry enough I thought it would stick around . . . so naturally it has been cold and rainy and we're getting 6-10" of snow this week! Mother Nature has a dark sense of humor!!

But it is progressing:
[Photo 1 @ the bottom of this post]

I also tracked down some pool filter sand for the open space in the center. This stuff was pretty hard to find - which I thought was kinda weird. There was also a HUGE variation in price. I got 50 lbs. from Ace hardware for $13 but I also found 50 lb. bags for over $50! That is nutty, IMO. Anyhow, here it is:
[Photo 2 @ the bottom of this post]

Once the soil is done mineralizing and I've sifted it all to remove all the random junk they include in bags of top soil I'll be ready to make some more strides . . . weather permitting - humpf! 😜
 

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#6 · (Edited)
Old Man Winter is Stupid!!!

My mineralized soil is not progressing:
[Photo 1 @ the bottom of this post]

You can see 2 corners of the tarp I have the soil on in the foreground and the rake is about where the other corner was . . . before it got encrusted in snow and ice.

I am disgusted!v:confused1:
 

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#8 · (Edited)
You know when a project snowballs . . .

Hi Planted Tankers,

Wuuf, did I bite off a lot of work on the tank yesterday! This could end-up being a LONG entry! I recommend grabbing a cuppa whatever you like best :wink2:

The first thing I got into unexpectedly was the mineralized soil. Our weather cleared up and the wind blew and my soil was ready to be sifted, twice. That's what I do at work so it felt quite familiar: scoop soil into screen, shake, repeat x 1,000,000. I have a high tolerance for tedium - haha!

Here's what that looked like:
[Photo 1 @ the bottom of this post]

Then my Mail Carrier found me playing in the dirt in the back yard, and gave me this:
[Photo 2 @ the bottom of this post]

A lovely package from Daud on of the swapn'shop. The plants were in great shape, great packaging, and few feebies thrown in too. I was pleased as pie.

After I was covered in soil dust I decided to surrender to dirty-job-mode and began tearing apart the tank - ugh!!!

I had planned to temporarily house the plants in a spare 6.5 gallon tank that I have lying around, it is long and low so I thought it would give me the most real estate. After I started pulling out the anubias I quickly realized that I was going to need a lot more room. They had been undisturbed so long that they were incredibly dense and their root mass was insane, most of them had roots that traveled to the far end of the tank under the gravel. I filled a ten gallon tank with them:
[Photo 3 @ the bottom of this post]
They are out of control!

I had suspected the anubias were steeling all the nutrients, because for a while my crypts have been on the decline, just looking very stunted. Mystery solved, they were being choked my the anubias root network.

I put all of them in the 6.5 gallon along with the new plants. I'm hoping a little grow-out time on their own will do them good.
[Photo 4 @ the bottom of this post]
It’s a little murky in there yet.

I also spent a while doing the delicate work of wrapping the new anchor moss and needle leaf java fern onto some driftwood. Again, I excel at tedious tasks :wink:
[Photo 5 @ the bottom of this post]

I also spent ages rinsing and sifting the old substrate. I put all the old black gravel in with the anubias- for now. All of the eco-complete went in for the crypts to root in. It was brutal, I saved $30? but was it worth it? Not too sure. But at least I don’t feel like I wasted all that perfectly good substrate, so there’s a little satisfaction.

It got late, I had XL raisins where my hands once were and I had had enough so this is what my tank area of the basement looks like right now :icon_eek:
[Photo 6 @ the bottom of this post]

I need to deep clean the tank, there is a little bit of green spot to banish and a lot of mineral deposits from our previous house that had very hard well water. Once that is done I can start installing my scape. But I’m tapped for this weekend! Thanks for reading, hope your tanks are treating you right!
 

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#10 · (Edited)
This tank was on hold until I could find a good block of time to power through the build.

I did it today!!

I have some time lapse videos to edit and then I'll do a proper update to the journal.

here's a teaser of the hardscape:
 

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#12 · (Edited)
Alright I figured out how to upload video on youtube!

Here is the link to a time lapse of the tank's reconstruction:
https://youtu.be/WOdCRVpFICY

This is the first time I've made any video of this sort so unfortunately I failed to anticipate that a lot of it would end up shots of my rear end - lesson learned for next time.

The new Sunsun HW 302 canister filter will arrive tomorrow and I'll be able to remove the circulating fan.

The drop checker has already turned yellow (I dialed the CO2 down in response after work today.)

I have my old coralife T-5 fixture running for two 4 hour windows. There is one 6700K and one 10,000K bulb.

I've run into a snag in the tank already (naturally) overnight the water tinted tea color, the driftwood had been boiled a lot and has been in a grow out tank for the last month so I suspect my mineralized soil is the culprit. I did a 50% water change today and that helped a bit. After I get the filter up and running I'll throw in some carbon and see if it helps . . . I'm normally pretty happy to have tannins in the water but I want this tank to stay a bit more crisp looking so I'm annoyed, but I'll get it sorted out in the end :)

Here's an FTS after filling up and installing the equipment I have on hand:
[Photo 1 @ the bottom of this post]

thanks for reading!
 

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#15 ·
Dear journal,

The tanins and/or sediment from the mineralized soil has cleared up, but the water is still a tad cloudy. Ordered Purigen.

The Sunsun canister filter is a terrible disappointment. It is terribly loud, no matter what I do. Will do more research on trouble shooting loud impellers but I fear I will have to replace it. I also realized, somewhat sheepishly, that I ordered a much larger filter than I intended. I had two Sunsun's on my Amazon shopping list, one for this tank and one for a larger tank that I've been brainstorming, as a "someday tank" . . . I bought the big one so I have approximately three-times the flow rate that I need for this tank . . . #$*!

Guess I'll save it and buy a smaller one, but because it's so loud I'm not sure which brand to choose! Oh indecision, how you plague me!!!

I've seeded the filtration media with filter media from the old mature tank and I'll begin adding ammonia today to start the cycling process.

Plants are already showing some growth and pearling a bit.

I still need to acquire two more varieties of crypt that I have my heart set on: parva and balansae

I'll post some water chemistry after I've picked-up some ammonia.

Gotta run and plant some apple trees, I'll add a bit more soon!
 
#17 ·
Funny you should mention Eheim, I ordered a Classic 250 (formerly known as 2213) yesterday. I always tend toward excessive filtration but even packed with media the 264gph of this Sunsun is too much flow for my 20 gallon tank. Add to that all the failed troubleshooting of the noisiness and I broke down and spent the money on an Eheim. I'll be returning the Sunsun to Amazon. I think I just got a bad one, I've read so many reviews from people who have these Sunsuns and swear they have to lift the spray bar out of the water to be sure the filter is running - they're that silent. But I'm ready to be done fussing over the filtration-ugh!

I also had to order different lily pipes, since the tubing is a different size, c'est la vie :rolleyes:

I swapped in a larger ceramic diffuser to this tank, but I have an inline diffuser ordered and if I like it, I'll order a second one for this tank.

I held off starting ammonia for the cycle, thinking It would be a cleaner process to wait until I have the new filter. Maybe I'll be able to get fish by August! So many delays, but I should try to enjoy the process, right?!

I'll post some pictures before too long, the crypts are looking quite happy in their new home!
 
#19 ·
I forgot I haven't provided any fertilizer info!

Funny Story

I have a ton of dry ferts that I bought a while back ----- can't find them ANYWHERE!

So I've been using flourish, potassium and iron.

But I will be tearing apart my basement and finding where ever I stuffed those ferts in our last move, dog-gone-it!!

wish me luck :eek5:
 
#20 ·
the filtration curse continues

Well The set-backs continue on this tank. I'm sorta pissed off. . .

The benefits of a brick and mortar store are that you get to see what you're buying before you hand over any money and you can interact with a real human. Amazon is great for a lot of things but in my attempts to get a filter for this tank I have had a really tough time.

The first one I ordered was the Sunsun HW302, while it is my fault it is overpowered for this tank, I would have kept it for the next one if this particular filter wasn't so loud (I suspect it is a lemon.) When I opened the package there was a little bit of dark mold on all 3 included filter floss, I thought it was weird but I just washed them thoroughly and setup the filter. In retrospect I think that the filter was returned by someone else before me and that is the reason the filter floss had been wet enough to grow mold.

So I ordered an Eheim, and counted upon the reputation of the manufacturer. Well that didn't work out either! The Eheim Classic 250 came today and there were 2 broken plastic pieces on the filter, one was part of the filter head, and the other was part of the media basket. The media was all disorganized and unpackaged so I suspect that this filter too had been previously returned by someone else and then added back into the regular stock to be sold again.

Both of these came from Amazon warehouses even though they were from different sellers. Since the common denominator is an Amazon warehouse, I'm inclined to believe that somewhere in their return process they aren't doing good quality control. And I'm pissed because even though the filter qualifies for Amazon Prime, the 2nd Eheim won't arrive until Tuesday.

It's a flippin good thing I haven't ordered any fish or shrimp for this tank yet or I'd be even more hot under the collar!

If only there were a brick and mortal LFS closer than 4 hours away, I'd be willing to pay the high markup right now, just to be able to have a properly working filter by tomorrow. humpf!! :mad:
 
#22 · (Edited)
It's update time!

The 2nd Eheim arrived, it is whole and pretty quiet, though no silent, I'll take it at this point!!

I received a lot of things in the mail this week - including the crypt balansae and parva that I ordered. The balansae is a little rough and melting a bit but I'm hoping it will pull through, after all: melting is hardly unusual in crypts.

The new fertilizers I ordered from GLA arrived too (I struck out hard on finding the hidden location of the ones I already have - total mystery!!)

I also ordered a build your own window screen frame and some clear 1/4" mesh to use with it --to prevent jumpers and allow for good light penetration. I'm really hopeful it will be a happy medium between how lovely an open topped tank looks and having peace of mind that my fish won't be able to jump in the night.

Now I need to get mixing on these ferts and then I hope to see some solid growth!!

here are the pictures:
[Photo 1 @ the bottom of this post]
[Photo 2 @ the bottom of this post]
*frets=ferts

I also have plans to enclose the stand with fabric panels secured to the iron stand with magnets. I have to decide what fabric I want to use though, and the choices are endless!!! (So could be a while! haha)
 

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#23 ·
Happy early 4th of July! (to all those in the U.S.)

I've tried to stay a little hands off for a while to give the plants time to get established and let the new tank stuff stabilize. Which has been challenging.

The driftwood has some pretty robust bacterial growth that looks like it's coming to an end but it has been hard to stop myself from taking it out and scrubbing it off. That would set back the kava fern and moss that is getting established though so I've just whimpered when passing the tank and kept my hands out!

I think I'm going to need to add more of the extra ecocomplete that I used to cap my mineralized soil. Each time I've planted in the back sections I've stirred up some light sediment that the lands like black snow flakes on the plant, rocks, and sand. So that sucks too. After I've been able to build up the cap I'll work on removing all the flecks of soil, I may need to add a bit more sand then too. We'll see.

I finally got around to mixing my PPS-Pro ferts. tonight so I'm looking forward to switching to them.

Here's the tank now- no clean-up so you can see the extent of the growing pains:



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
#24 · (Edited)
Things are falling into place

Hi everyone! Lots of elements of this tank are finally getting to their final phase, it's taken a while but I may be ready for fish very soon!!

On a different subject: It seems photobucket has changed their policies and now are requiring me to pay something like $400 to share my photos through them . . . . so that isn't happening. I will try to go back through the older posts and replace the photobucket links with the correct photos but I anticipate that might be a little arduous, so it is likely to take me a while -- Sad Day :icon_sad:

But on to happier news!

I went through another phase of leaving the tank alone to allow the new-tank bacterial bloom and diatoms to run their course. The first photo bellow is what the tank looked like a few days ago, before I did any work on it. You can't tell from the photo how much diatom and green spot algae were developing on the glass. You can see the diatoms that are on the drop checker and the rocks and the tannins in the water from the mineralized soil being insufficiently capped (as I discussed in my las post.)

I replaced the iconic Eheim tubing with clear (see 2nd photo below) -- sorry Ehiem! ;-)

I also installed the inline CO2 diffuser (see 3rd photo below.) I LOOOOOVE IT! Seriously, I never realized how much cleaner my tank would look without the diffuser in the tank. I also really love the absence of the squealing sound that so frequently accompanied the cheap ceramic diffusers I had. I am totally sold on these things--awesome addition to my setup!

I added more of the old ecocomplete that I am using to cap the mineralized soil in this tank. I think I have good coverage now and I'm not intending to plant any thing else so substrate disturbance should be done for a long time. If I continue to have issues there is plenty more ecocomplete to keep adding. The bad news is that it is harder to control where every grain lands once you have water in the tank so I have gotten some contamination in my sand sections. It isn't too distracting and some day I might decide to sit there with my pincettes and remove the offending black dots, but I'm content for the moment :nerd:

In the 4th picture you can see that I added more rock to the borders between the planted substrate and the pool filter sand. They looked a little thin to me and I could see the corrugated plastic that I used for my "retaining walls" in a couple of places. Adding the new rocks created a pretty bif color contrast between old and new -- the old rocks appear much more brown since they have diatoms growing on them, the new ones are much bluer. Hopefully when I add shrimp they will munch away at it :)

The other thing I did was finally sew the fabric panel with magnets along the edges allowing me to hide all of my equipment and supplies that I keep under the tank. This has made a HUGE difference. For some reason I can sit and look at the tank and enjoy it more. I think all the tools and supplies for maintenance being always visible made me feel like I should be trimming or scrapping or fiddling in some manner and with them hidden I feel more able to enjoy the tank instead of being distracted by the tank-chore list. So that's pretty sweet!

Thanks for looking everyone -- hope you enjoy :D
 

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#26 ·
I can't help with the orientation, but your tank looks gorgeous! What inline diffuser did you go with? Im undecided if I want the mass of a cerges or Grigg reactor or a simple inline diffuser. I don't have a cabinet to hide things in as my 2 75's are on top of one another on a rack.
 
#27 ·
Thanks Dude!
Ah yes, I used to have this stand set up with a lower tank too, it's a nice look but it makes equipment choices challenging for sure.

The inline diffuser is one I found on amazon (link) I'll attach a photo of the box below. After 5 days set-up with it I really love it. We'll see how it goes over the long term- you never know.
 

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#28 ·
I've gone through and edited all of the posts that had photobucket hosted images. Unfortunately I don;t know how to place attached images in the text so they are all at the bottom of each post. But they're there and I've tried to direct the reader to the right image within the text as a solution.

Now if I could only discover the secret to upright portrait oriented photos! Some are posting correctly now, but not all. It's a mystery! :p

cheers everyone, thanks for checking out my build!
 
#29 ·
Soooo, I've had some pretty intense surface scum, protein, film, whatever you'd like to call it. This is something that does not plague any of my three other tanks, nor have I had it in a freshwater tank before. The most obvious variable that's different in this tank is the mineralized soil. I saw soil mentioned as a possible cause of surface scum in another thread, has anyone else made this link?

Anyhow I'm not too concerned about getting to the bottom of the cause because I bought a delightful gadget to correct it, which is fun!! :)

I ordered a surface skimming in-flow lily pipe. It came 17mm instead of 13mm and I almost sent it back but decided to see if it would fit my 1/2" tubing. After a little work with a hairdryer I succeeded. It's rather huge, but being glass it's unobtrusive and it fits nicely behind one of my pieces of driftwood.

After I first installed it, it didn't seem to be skimming much, it was floating too high. after some tinkering I figured out I could use the dropper that I dose micros with to suck a little bit of air from the bubble that was keeping the float too high. It worked perfectly! The skimmer is skimming and the slightly larger inflow pipe seems to have increased the flow from my filter. (It was not too high before so there was room for a little increase in flow without the danger of creating too much current.) I am pleased as pie:grin2:

I owe you all a photo of this new equipment but it has gotten late, the lights are out, I am sleepy, so I'm afraid it will have to wait till tomorrow.

Sweet dreams!
 
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