My Freecycle tank 55g!

[OoglyBoogly]

Current:
December 3rd 2010


Here is a progression

September 9th
October 12th
October 19th
October 31st
November 11th


fishtankprogress_september-to-oct31_2010 by mikeytitan, on Flickr

Here is the rack before/after I modified the aquarium hood light and put in a dual t5 36" ballast etc...


before_and_after_hood-mod by mikeytitan, on Flickr

I plan on using the bottom tank to try and breed Celestial Pearl Danios and moss.

Details on the tank can be found here so I don't have to copy/paste a wall of text.

Input/criticism is very welcome. No CO2 either.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/3726253...th/5098989128/


Planted Aquarium

Fauna:
Red Cherry Shrimps ALL DEAD - Stealth Heater broke in the middle of the night raising the temp of tank and leaking an oily fluid everywhere
Cardinal Tetras
Endler Guppies
Otocinclus Dwarf Catfish
Malysian Trumpet Snails
Tadpole Snails
1x Red Wiggler Worm (for the lols)

hopefuls:
Celestial Pearl Danios
Blackworms
Golden Clam to filter the water column



Flora:
brazillian pennywort
Ceratophyllum demersum - coontail
Hemianthus callitrichoides - Dwarf Baby Tears
Micranthemum umbrosum - Baby Tears
Brazilian Elodea - Anachris
Anubias minima
Hydrocotyle leucocephala - Brazilian Pennywort
Bacopa monnieri - Water Hyssop
Ceratopteris thalictroides - Water Sprite, Indian Fern
Hygrophila difformis - Water Wisteria
Lemna minor - Lesser Duckweed
Vesicularia dubyana - Java Moss
Dwarf Hairgrass

Flora (new bulk addition)
Clinopodium cf. brownei
Bacopa salzmannii
Bacopa carolina
Lindernia sp. varigated
Lindernia sp india
Heteranthera zosterifolia
Lysimachia nummularia (very similar to the clino, but a more yellow color, also called 'creeping jenny')
Hygrophilia sp. bold (or tiger, I am not sure which)
Rotala rotundfolia
Blyxa Japonica
Ludwigia repens x arcuata
Ludwigia brevipes
Pellia
Flame moss
Unknown moss (not java)
Emersed crypt lutea
Various crypt babies
Limnophilia sp. wavy

Equipment:
Eheim 2217 Canister Filter
55g Aquarium Glass Tank
2x 40w T12 - 4 foot fluorescent bulbs in modified hood/ballast from Home Depot
submersible Heater (not sure how many watts bc it's old)
Thinking about making a homemade CO2 generator using yeast and sugar combined with a makeshift reactor... not sure yet

Food:
Tetra red chunky dried food that i crush for the bc the brine shrimp haven't yet hatched
Hikari Tropical fish micro pellets
Hikari wheat germ - medium pellet crushed with fingers

Chemicals:
Seachem Fluorish - micronutrient liquid fertilizer (very little Nitrogen bc the fish poop/nitrifying bacteria provide that)

30 pounds of river rock underneath 25 pounds of cheap painted (quality wise ) black gravel

[gringostar9]

Looks beautiful. Good work.

[GitMoe]

Filled in nicely. Good layout. Standard 55g tanks are impossible to scape well. Im a fan of everything except what looks like Hornwort in the back. Hate that stuff so much...

[OoglyBoogly]

Originally Posted by gringostar9

Looks beautiful. Good work.

Thank you, everyday I look at it I have this urge to stink my arm in it and change something around. Haha I guess this isn't the worst addiction to have... right? RIGHT?

Originally Posted by GitMoe

Filled in nicely. Good layout. Standard 55g tanks are impossible to scape well. Im a fan of everything except what looks like Hornwort in the back. Hate that stuff so much...

The lack of depth looking in at the stock 55g tank is limiting in that I feel like I can only think of plant placement horizontally and vertically. Depth looking into the tank is something I dream about everytime I look at an ADA tank (amongst other nice features that they have).

There are a few plants that I'd like to eventually get rid of but they made great first plants bc they grew so ridiculously fast and filled up the empty space and/or hid certain eyesores. The hornwort like plant is hiding the pre-filter sponge and heater. I find that its individual brances start to look nice when they are short but they become leggy and wind up floating across the top of the tank until I I fold them in half and put a rock on top of the fold so that it looks thicker but shorter. Maybe one day I'll pass this on to another freecycler with my water sprites and hornworts!

I've been wanting to get some dwarf hairgrass to grow in patches on the extreme left and right side of the tank using rocks dug into the gravel to keep it separate from the Dwarf Baby Tears. I'd like to build a wall using some plastic canvas covered with weeping moss. I also think flame moss would look great covering the tops of the red rocks in the tank. Perhaps I'll grab one from my backyard and cu the bottom off to make it flat so it can stand straight up too balance out the height of the tank and lack of depth.

Cheers

[TheFishJunky]

Looks incredible!What do you dose with?

[OoglyBoogly]

Originally Posted by TheFishJunky

Looks incredible!What do you dose with?

Thank you!
I dose with about 1 cap full (5ml) of Seachem Flourish a week.

http://www.seachem.com/Products/prod.../Flourish.html

[GitMoe]

Capful is 5ml... 250ml would likely be the entire bottle unless you have the bigger bottle...lol

Dosing any Excel or just the regular Flourish?

[OoglyBoogly]

Originally Posted by GitMoe

Capful is 5ml... 250ml would likely be the entire bottle unless you have the bigger bottle...lol

Dosing any Excel or just the regular Flourish?

Haha wow derp on my part... I'll go back and edit that! Just using Flourish, although I thought about using excel since I don't use co2... I'm currently looking at a DIY paintball co2 injector thread since I have a 24 and 9 ounce co2 paintball tanks sitting around collecting dust.

http://www.plantedtank.net/forums/di...diy-setup.html

[TheFishJunky]

Originally Posted by OoglyBoogly

Thank you!
I dose with about 1 cap full (5ml) of Seachem Flourish a week.

http://www.seachem.com/Products/prod.../Flourish.html

that's pretty incredible that you are getting that much result from just that dose.Keep it up,definitely looks like you are doing things right in my opinion.

[OoglyBoogly]

Originally Posted by TheFishJunky

that's pretty incredible that you are getting that much result from just that dose.Keep it up,definitely looks like you are doing things right in my opinion.

FYI, my tank is pretty filthy and has way too much string algae and bearded algae for my liking. I took a few tests using a freshwater master test kit over the course of a few weeks and all my reading for ammonioa, nitrite, and nitrates were 0ppm so I figured that my tank was really chewing through the nitrates so I began overfeeding my fish. I has some suspicions about the tests so I did a little forum warrior digging and found out that the API Nitrate bottle #2 chemicals start to crystalize and form crystals in the bottom so the solution is not longer made up of whatever dissolved chemicals give an accurate result! I banged the bottle on the floor a couple of times and shook it up for about 3 minutes and when I did a nitrate test and the test tube turned bloody red! I had no idea how to interprate that since I was thinking that the solution was still not mixed properly or perhaps it just went bad. I looked up the lot number on the bottom of the bottle which basically is the last 4 digits showing the month and year on the bottle. The solutions should still be good as they are only a year old so I tested plain tap water. The tap water came out 0ppm. So I diluted the tank water to 1/8th tank water, 7/8th tap water and the solution was a very dark orange! I did a 50% water change the next day and my fish never showed signs of being unhealthy pre/post water change so I'm just going to do a 20% water change in a week or two and clean the filter tomorrow.

Oh yea I also added about 5 tablespoons of salt to my water about 2 months ago from what I had read in regard to a little bit of marine salt being healthy for fish and I didn't want to overdue it. I have didn't add anymore salt with the 50% partial water change... heh I'm probably playing with fire but I don't want to have to buy all sorts of tests or become a marine biologist in 1 week to correct all my tanks problems... I figure I'll fumble along and slowboat my acquisition of skills, knowledge, wisdom, and equipment until I hopefully one day have one of those amazing looking tanks that you see here:

http://showcase.aquatic-gardeners.org/2009.cgi

Anyways, I had already been overfeeding my fish for quite some time bc I thought more nitrates were a solution to all my plants initially melting when I first placed them in a new tank. After a bit of reading I had decided that I would see how my rooted plants would do with a buildup of mulm in the really cheap LFS gravel and voila everything started to finally grow under 2x T12 fluorescent bulbs in a $20 home depot shop light fixture. I'd read that the decomposing material from fish poop and decayed plant leaves produces some CO2 and the methane is converted to safer compounds so perhaps the mulm on the bottom combined with the respiration of the fish + buildup of co2 when the lights are off at night is just enough to keep my plants relatively healthy looking.

I had my lights on for about 16 hours and recently changed them to around 12 hours. I noticed that my water wysteria would close it's leaves a few hours before my lights turned off at night so that pretty much was a clear sign that the lights weren't doing anymore for the plants past a certain amount of time.

[GitMoe]

Lots of plants fold up at night. Its one of my favorite things to see in the tank after the lights go off. My cabomba fold up hard like an umbrella. My wysteria do the same thing. Sounds like you have your own system worked out to keep the plants happy. Have you tested your tanks GH? Sometimes really hard water is loaded with nutrients right out of the tap and additional ferts needed are minimized. Im lucky enough to be in that situation...

[F22]

Very nice tank, why not dump in some SAE and amano shrimp?

[OoglyBoogly]

Originally Posted by GitMoe

Lots of plants fold up at night. Its one of my favorite things to see in the tank after the lights go off. My cabomba fold up hard like an umbrella. My wysteria do the same thing. Sounds like you have your own system worked out to keep the plants happy. Have you tested your tanks GH? Sometimes really hard water is loaded with nutrients right out of the tap and additional ferts needed are minimized. Im lucky enough to be in that situation...

Ah yes the wysteria is amusing since I have a bunch of it all around the tank. It's kind of nice how the undersides of the leaves look so white compared to the part that faces the light. I think I had cabomba as one of the first plants in the aquarium and it "melted" and never came back. The Hornwort looking plant did the same and left what looked like needles everywhere. I thought it had perished but eventually I noticed a very small piece of it stuck on a leaf and voila it's been growing ever since.

Our water goes through a LOT of testing so this info is easily available:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/wsstate09.pdf

Hardness (mg/L CaCO3) ranges from 17-23 since we get our water from different resevoirs depending on where in NYC you are located... so it averages at 19 mg/L which is about the same in ppm. Lol I used this site to figure that out, :

http://www.unitconversion.org/concen...onversion.html

So straight out of the tap, the water is soft at about 1 degree of DH and according to this site the water is soft:

http://www.thetropicaltank.co.uk/hardness.htm

I never knew about the importance of GH in an aquarium and it's buffering ability to deal with PH swings. I have a piece of coral that I used to hold down the eheim outlet using fishing string bc the suction cups are so old that they won't suction anymore and I was worried about the outlet somehow magically shooting water out of the tank while I wasn't around. I wonder if that is somehow leaching calcium into the tank.

[OoglyBoogly]

Originally Posted by F22

Very nice tank, why not dump in some SAE and amano shrimp?

I tried to pickup some SAE the day I bought my Otocinclus and dwarf baby tears from pacific aquarium which is an LFS on Delancy street but they didn't have any although I was told they did over the phone... /sigh The Otos look like they are always scouring the tank for algae but I never seem to see any difference. I have about 14 Red Cherry Shrimp (5 adults, about 9 tiny ones that I spotted 2 weeks ago) but they seem content just picking at invisible debris that is too small for my eyes to see. Perhaps I'll keep an eye out for Amano Shrimp but the LFS that I've come across don't seem to carry much other than the same stuff I've been seeing for as long as I can remember. Oh and the price difference is ridiculous! One store out in Suffolk were selling Otocinclus for about $9 each, and then Pacific Aquarium had 3 left and were selling them for about $2 each (buy 2 get 1 free)... granted one of them died but still it's as if one needs to be an expert in the prices of fish just to know what an average price should be.

Lol I guess I have another reason to possibly add more fish. I've been trying to focus on what I have now and not spend any more money. Perhaps someone local would be willing to trade Endler guppies for a few amano shrimp and/or SAE. The endler guppy breeding in my tank is out of control! I started out with 1 breeding pair a few months ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaFn3m-fdxQ

[F22]

Oogly, I work in a shop in ny and we have a TON of SAE in stock