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A tale of 3 tanks: My DIY project journal (10g planted/33g planted/55g)

22K views 150 replies 38 participants last post by  danstock 
#1 · (Edited)
Hello all!

I have another thread on here (that definitely needs to be updated) for my DIY 33 gallon planted community tank, but I'd like to introduce my latest project.

Everything I do with my aquariums is DIY and done on a budget, partially because it's difficult to find anything but the basics here in Nova Scotia, Canada, but mostly because I enjoy tinkering and building things myself whenever possible.

This particular tank started as a fry tank for my 55 gallon mbuna Cichlid tank and evolved into a low-light no-tech holding tank for a few ferns and mosses - basically all put together with leftovers from my other builds.

About 2 months ago, I decided to finally spruce it up a bit and began planning what I wanted to accomplish.

The tank itself is a basic, cheap 10 gallon that was given to my by my sister in law when she realized fish tanks actually take some work. I de-rimmed it immediately but, up until recently, never really put much thought into it beyond that.

My goal was simplicity and relatively low-maintenance/low cost but, most of all, I wanted it to look good without breaking the bank. To me, this means absolutely the bare minimum for visible equipment in the tank.

With this goal I devised a plan for how it would be lit, filtered, heated, CO2 injected and displayed without any ugly equipment getting in that. It took a while to get everything the way I wanted, but I'd say I did pretty well!


Tank: 20"x10"x12" 10 Gallon (DIY de-rimmed)
Lighting: CurrentUSA Satellite+
CO2: DIY w/ two 2l bottles, check/shutoff/needle valves, DIY bubble counter and fed into a Ista Max Mix inline CO2 reactor.
Filtration: Fluval 105 w/ eBay lily pipes, stainless steal prefilter and clear tubing.
Substrate: EcoComplete capped with Pool Filter Sand
Heating: Hydor 200w inline heater
Dosing: EI dosing pre-mixed Macro and Micro on alternating days, Flourish root tabs in substrate, occaisional Excel spot treatment and Iron supplements.
Flora: Eleocharis acicularis, Eleocharis vivipara, Glosso, and Blyxa Japonica and Java Moss
Fauna: 7 neon tetras, 5+ red cherry shrimp

New setup has been up and running for about 3 weeks (since the tear down and rebuild...running for over a year prior to that) so the plants all need to grow in and I'm still working some small bugs out, but it's getting there!



All of the equipment is mounted on a shelf I built under the desk (originally an Ikea computer desk, but it's been modified quite a bit). The shelf is hidden by a cabinet door that, when it's closed, is pretty tough to notice. The filter tubing gets to the tank via small holes that I drilled into the table so all that is visible is clear tubing, lily pipes and the tank itself.

I also built a box-shelf over top of the aquarium (which actually holds my TV... this is all for the computer desk in my Man Cave) and that box contains my Current USA Satellite+ fixture. This puts it about 10-11" from the substrate, so I could use more light, but it could be worse.

I will take some better pics and also show the inner workings later tonight, but I figured I'd get a start on this thread now.

Let me know what you think!
 
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#36 ·
Thanks! It took some time to work out the kinks, but I believe I've come up a pretty good setup in both the 33 and the 10 gallon. Sure, I'd love to have a pressurized setup, but I get good results with minimal effort using DIY. An over-built system like mine really makes DIY CO2 a viable option in my opinion. No leaks, moderate control of flow, layered production with staggered refills and enough pressure to get 2+ BPS through a ceramic diffuser. Plus it looks kinda neat! lol
 
#38 ·
Wow, thank you so much!

I love my cichlid tank, too. It looks way better in person, I think, and I'm not totally sold on the driftwood (a recent addition back into the tank to add some more territories and cut down on the light intensity a bit), but here's a picture of the 55g from today as well:

(sorry for the reflection... it's a hard tank to get a good picture of)

 
#39 ·
I wasn't happy with how that last picture represented my 55g tank, so I adjusted a few things and took another with the room light off to give you a better idea what the scape really looks like. Due to the size of the room and placement of the tank, it's a very hard aquarium to get a good picture of. This was just taken hand held with an old Kodak camera, but it's a much nicer picture of my setup. The entire rockscape is made from rocks I scavenged from the ditch in front of my house lol

 
#40 ·
This thread is basically becoming a journal for all 3 of my tanks. I don't have any new pics of the 10g, but all is going well. I'm fighting a bit of BGA, which is keeping me busy, but I feel like I'm getting it under control. Plants are slowly growing in, but still a ways to go...

I have my tank maintenance to do tomorrow and plan on taking some progress pictures but, for tonight, I thought Id post a new picture of my 33g planted community tank:



It's growing in nicely! All still under chinese 10w LED flood lights and DIY CO2 :D
 
#42 ·
Update time:

I finally won my battle with BGA, installed a ramp timer on the Satellite+, did a major trim, minor re-scape, moved some plants around, replaced my broken lily pipe intake, finalized my design on the DIY external drop checker, swapped my background lights for LEDs, tweaked my DIY CO2 setup a bit and finally dialed in all my lighting periods/timers.

All in all, I'd say it is all done to the point I should be able to stop disturbing it (aside from feeding, ferts and water changes) and let it (hopefully) continue to mature and fill in.





Any thoughts? Questions? Suggestions?
I'm all ears...
 
#45 ·
dude. i love this...

how are you liking the ramp on/off timer with the sat +? i was thinking about getting one myself.
Thanks very much!

I like the ramp timer. Definitely worth the $25-30 I paid for it and really completes the Sat+. That being said, I always run mine at full intesity (full spectrum mode, usually) so I'm unaffected by any of the strobing issues many others have reported. My only gripe is that I would prefer a longer, more gradual "ramp" time. 15 minutes is nice, but I'd personally prefer it to slowly increase/decrease over 60 minutes instead.

It would also be nice if it could include moonlighting somehow, but I have independant moonlighting on a separate timer that comes on 10 mins before the ramp down begins (9pm), stays on until midnight and then back on at 8am until 10 mins after full intesity is reached (1pm). That works alright, but having one light on a ramp timer and everything else just clicking on/off messes with my OCD. Down the road I'd like to aquire a couple more ramp timers and modify them to work with my moon and accent lighting but it's not my top priority yet.

Either way, for the cost, I think it's a "must have" for Sat+ users at least until Current USA comes out with a product that allows you to increase the dimmer period and/or add random weather effects or a 24/7 cycle, etc. for these lights (or until someone else starts pre-packaging an Arduino-type IR controller for them or something similar).
 
#47 ·


Here's a quick video I just took showing the DIY CO2 system in action on my 33g. The 10g is identical aside from it using 1 less bottle and it is fed into an inline reactor instead of a ceramic diffuser. Puts out pretty good pressure for a yeast system!
 
#49 ·
Since my last major update, a few things have changed with the stock. I have had my ups-and-downs with attempted shrimp keeping so, for the past month or 2, this tank was simply housing 4 otos and 3 dwarf puffers.

I slowly lost all of my original cherry shrimp over a number of weeks. Never seemingly to the wrath of the puffers, as most deceased shrimp were removed fully intact. I assume it may have been the high levels of CO2 in my tank, but 3 puffers constantly hunting certainly didn't help (though I had a few shrimp become berried and even had a number of juvies before the population declined entirely). I decided to try my hand again and ordered a dozen high quality "ultra red" cherry shrimp online, only to have the package delayed and 100% DOA (with no coverage). I decided to cut my losses, pick up 5-6 cheap ghost shrimp, accilmate them slowly and see what happens. Those have all settled in nicely (despite the CO2, high fert levels or aggressive puffers).

Fast forward a few weeks and I have unfortunately now lost 2 of my 3 dwarf puffer fish. The first was sucked, tail first, into the filter intake. I usually run with a SS mesh prefilter (or sometimes even sponge) but I wasn't expecting any ghost shrimp babies and figured the small slits on my lily pipe would be harmless to the other critters, so I removed it. Days later I found my puffer sucked in and, although she was still alive when I found her, she succumbed to the stress/injuries shortly after. This left 2 puffers alive until last week, after a 10 day vacation (with a good buddy looking after my tanks), when a second dwarf puffer mysteriously died. It looked a bit underfed, but I can't say for sure. Perhaps the remaining puffer was bullying it or any number of things (as all water parameters and livestock were/are testing normal), but it's not often that I lose any fish at this point, so I can really say for sure what happened.

So, this ultimately left me with 4 otos, 1 dwarf puffer and ~5 ghost shrimp. I decided to try cherries one last time and, on Sunday, I picked up 40-45 (of various maturity levels - including 5 berried females) for next to nothing from a semi-local breeder. They're low grade, but at least I know they took a very small journey from an established/healthy tank to get to me, which is a variable I wasn't able to confirm with any of my other pet store attempts.

To eliminate as many other issues as possible with their introduction I turned off my CO2 for 2 days, ran a bubbler 24/7 (instead of just at night, as usual), and drip acclimated the lot of them for over 5 hours before adding them to the tank. I have since slowly ramped the CO2 back up and will continue to do so for another day or 2 and, so far at least, all seems well. I had one jump out overnight the first night but, since then, I haven't had any problems.

Fingers crossed that this time I can actually get them to colonize and mature. I'm hoping that with the increased number of shrimps (as well as the already berried females introducing even more) that the puffer (if he was even part of the problem) is only able to keep the population in check without actually wiping them out. Only time will tell, I suppose...


So, long story long, the new stock is as follows:

1 dwarf puffer
4 otocinclus
5 ghost shrimp
40+ red cherry shrimp
 
#51 ·
Thanks very much! I grew up building cars in much the same fashion (mostly due to where I live and the difficulty to aquire any of the latest name-brand or in-style anything at a reasonable cost) and it's always been fun! I'm not cut off from the real world by any stretch, but there's no one around here selling rimless tanks or high powered lighting (retail OR second hand) and no where near the access to plants, livestock or even other aquarists around here. Hell, I've literally never even seen another planted tank in person outside of my local chain pet stores..

4 years ago I knew nothing about fish keeping, 2 years ago I knew even less than that about aquatic plants yet, through the joys and pains of trial-and-error (and waiting weeks/months for shipping) you end up with a better understanding of how to accomplish your goals (ie. why you failed so badly). Then you do it all over again with a better plan and get it all right... except for all the new problems you uncover along the way. So it's a constant thought process and an exercise in planning/research but I wouldn't have it any other way. My fiancee doesn't even both to ask me what I'm thinking about when I zone out anymore... she's just sure it's something to do with one of my tanks, and she's right.

To me, there's nothing more satisfying than that feeling when you're staring at your tank (or car, yard, home, whatever) wondering, "What the hell else can I do to improve it??"

Before you know it you're down to just the very anal nit-picky problems that only you would ever notice and then you realize... holy [censored]. That's starting to look pretty good!

Then something breaks, fails, or falls apart and the cycle continues. I love it! (most of the time)
 
#52 ·
Your DP might not be eating your shrimp but he may be attacking and stressing them out. I see my DP and South American puffer nipping at limbs of ghost shrimp. I am ok with that because the ghost shrimp are there for trimming teeth but with cherries that could cause problems.

What are your water parameters? I just started keeping shrimp with co2 and mine are doing fine but I run co2 and air 24/7.
 
#53 ·
Your DP might not be eating your shrimp but he may be attacking and stressing them out. I see my DP and South American puffer nipping at limbs of ghost shrimp. I am ok with that because the ghost shrimp are there for trimming teeth but with cherries that could cause problems.
I share your concern but, in my mind, I just can't imagine a single, tiny puffer being about to affect 40+ cherries in a significant enough way to decimate their population - especially with my pre-berried females. Best case scenario (I'm hoping for), he feeds off of the juveniles, kills/harasses the odd adult and the population just grows more slowly and my puffer benefits from a nice live-food diet (I also add pest snails from my community tank often and feed frozen bloodworms a few times a week). I just want to make sure that if anything kills the shrimp it's my puffer fish and not my water params (at least then it's just as if I spent $20 on live food instead of another waste of time and shrimp). I'll keep you posted...

What are your water parameters? I just started keeping shrimp with co2 and mine are doing fine but I run co2 and air 24/7.
As of this morning, my water parameters are as follows:

pH - 7.3 (AM with lights off, inline aeration running for past 12 hours)
pH - ?? (PM after running CO2 all day w/ no aeration - I'll update this later on)
Ammonia - 0
Nitrite - 0
Nitrate - <10 (50% water change was less than 2 days ago and this is before I dosed Macros today)
GH - 7.84 dGH
KH - 4.48 dKH
TDS - 419 ppm (I assume this is high due to EI dosing?? I can't keep it below 300 in this tank or my 33g community, which both are high-fert, high-co2 tanks with large weekly water changes. My heavily stocked cichlid tank is always 150-225 and tap water is <100)
Temp - 75 F
CO2 - 1.57 BPS into inline reactor (30+ ppm during photoperiod)

As of this morning, I have ramped my CO2 production back up to my "normal" levels (~1.5 BPS) and I've yet to notice any ill effects to my new inhabitants. No shrimp deaths yet (as far as I can tell), but they're not the most active shrimp I've ever seen. The ghost shrimp are much more lively right now, but I assume they'll get more adventurous as they settle in.


FYI - I shut my CO2 off completely on Friday evening and turned on my aeration 24/7, added shrimp Sunday afternoon (<1 drip per second acclimation over 5-6 hours), back to aeration only at night but still no CO2, started with less than 0.5 BPS CO2 on Monday with lights-on, ramped up slightly on Tuesday (around 1 BPS, maybe a little less) and now I'm back up to 1.5 BPS 24/7 with aeration running from lights-off until an hour before lights-on. Plants pearl like crazy after a few hours of light, drop checker gets yellow-green, and the critters don't seem to act any different. Here's hoping the new shrimp will thrive with the gradual acclimation. If not - I give up lol
 
#55 ·
Quick picture update of my other two tanks. The 33g community tank is filling in nicely (now that I've seemingly beat the current wave of BBA into submission) and my nice, low-maintenance 55g cichlid tank is chugging along with no issues, as usual.

Due for filter maintenance, scheduled water changes and good cleaning/trims all around this weekend, so maybe I will update after that.



 
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