ADA Mini-S Iwagumi, Now with 100% more Origami

[Dollface]

Originally Posted by amphirion

hahahaha! HOW COULD YOU HATE MANZANTIA!? I LOVE IT SOOOOO MUCH!

anywho, glad to see you working on a tank project! looking forward to seeing your progress!

Do you want it? Please, take it. I don't think I can handle any more twigs.

Originally Posted by freph

I feel that the picture of you holding a single portion of HC in pincettes deserves some sort of awesome caption. Just sayin'.

Feel free to come up with something, I'm terrible at photo titles.

[Dollface]

Okay, to be honest, my patience for narrating is kind of petering out, and I don't have any more particularly artsy low depth of field shots to string you along with, so here's the finalized hardscape prior to planting.



I'll have with-water photos for you tomorrow, along with some details about the set up.

[FlyingGiraffes]

Looks great. Gonna put this on sfbaaps?

[Dollface]

Day 1

Not much going on here, honestly. Today I'll be starting the maintenance routine as described in Franks' Mini-M thread, daily water changes for the first week, beginning to dose with Green Bacter, then Brighty K, and finally Step 1, but I'll get to that later. Right now, I'm honestly just enjoying the tank being up. I actually set it up last night, and it was kind of amazing watching the HC already pearling only an hour or two after I had filled and set up the Advance system.

If I had to give up everything but one part of this system, I'd keep the advance. Every single piece of the ADA equipment is a work of art in itself, but the advance system is where the combination of craftsmanship, functionality, and aesthetics really shines. It literally took me all of 5 minutes to hook everything up, it was as simple as screwing on the regulator to the cartridge, attaching the ball valve, and then running the tubing to the check valve, bubble counter, and finally the do!aqua music glass mini 15 that I'm using in place of the one that comes standard.

The decidedly non-ADA point and shoot off to the side is for a time lapse, which is something I've wanted to do with a tank for a while now. It's rigged up on mini tripod twist tied to the rack stand. It's not the greatest quality, but it should get the job done.

[Francis Xavier]

The time lapse will be very cool!

[freph]

Ooh. I like this. Can't wait to see it fill in. Any other plant ideas or just a nice, lush carpet of HC?

[Dollface]

Originally Posted by freph

Ooh. I like this. Can't wait to see it fill in. Any other plant ideas or just a nice, lush carpet of HC?

Just HC, this is my first time growing it seriously so it's going to be a learning experience. I may add some hair grass in the future, but we'll see.

[freph]

Pretty easy plant to grow imo...once it gets rooted well it takes off. Good light and CO2/Excel made it go weed mode for me. Ime trimming should be avoided until it gets about 1/2-3/4" tall and rooted otherwise you just end up pulling out plants by accident and that's always frustrating. You might have a different experience than I did but a few friendly tips never hurt anyone.

[Francis Xavier]

Dollface is taking a very, very wise approach growing just a plant at a time here, I must say.

The reason is, now she can master the growth patterns and tendencies of HC (now she's already mastered hair grass), so next time she does a lay out she'll be able to do all sorts of really cool things really easily with HC + hair grass.

I've also got to say, that's a great stone arrangement. This is the first I've seen it with slope.

I can visualize now how the HC will slope over the rocks from behind and create some badass back drop to the front.

[Dollface]

Midway through the first water change, the tint of the water was even more noticeable in real life.

PS: Whoever said that green bacter smelled like barbecue is right. I should probably eat before water changes from now on.

[Dollface]

Day 2

Post water change. I managed to clumsily disturb some of the substrate in the front which dislodged some of the HC, so in the future I'm going to stick to draining with airline tubing. Still not much going on, I'm kind of amazing that frank manages to write three paragraph posts about a 5 minute water change, honestly. The only thing I really have to note is how much I love these mini- pipes. The flow is just perfection. I'm never going back to a spray bar, or a filter without quick disconnects for that matter.

[ADAtank]

setup looks good I would take out maybe a rock or two but its not bad

[Dollface]

I intended for most of the rocks to be obscured once the HC grows in. Plus it'd be kind of hard to just "take out" any of the rocks without destroying the scape.

[Dollface]

Speaking of the scape, I may as well show some progress shots of how it came together. Some of these are from my camera phone, so it's not quite DSLR pretty, and boy I wish I had cleaned my living room last week now...


I struggled for a while because I was essentially going backwards. I had this secondary stone placed first, and I tried to work all the other stones around that.

That was stupid. Don't do that.


After cycling through a few different variations, I settled on this. A final picture was starting to come together in my mind, but again, trying to work around the secondary stone was messing me up. It competed with the main stone rather than supported it, and don't even get me started on the right hand side. It didn't have nearly enough "weight", and the stone would've been almost completely obscured with a full carpet of HC.


Here's the closest picture I have to the final scape. I changed out the secondary stone, but now it just didn't have enough, well, oomph. What I ended up doing was using the stone from the previous scapes, but turned around in a different position. The stone directly beneath the main stone is mostly for added height and support, otherwise it tended to sink down, diminishing its presence. It's going to be almost entirely obscured once the carpet grows in.

Really, this process taught me a lot of things. Most of all though is the importance of a slope. I was working with maybe 1/3 the volume of substrate than I have in the tank now, and it showed. Most of the scapes ended up terribly flat and it was incredibly frustrating. The added variation in height and depth can definitely make or break a scape.

[ikuzo]

happens to me too recently
slopes go down a lot when you fill the water
i used 10 kg of substrate for a 10 gallon tank and it looks like i just use 5 kg

i kinda like the second pic where the secondary rock is bigger