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18,163 Posts
Hate to rain on your plans but...
Unless you're doing it for aesthetic reasons, Eco Complete is inert. There's nothing special about it. It's also not always great for carpeting plants like Dwarf Hair Grass because of its size and weight and the scale may be a bit too large for a tank as small as the 60F. But that's up to you. If you want black, consider any number of black sands on the market. Or even smaller crushed lava rock. With EC, you're just paying for branding. You could get enough sand or crushed lava for far less than $10. If you already have EC on-hand, then it obviously makes sense. But if you don't? Encourage you to shop around.
Twinstar Sterilizer is generally a waste of money for a number of reasons.
The 60F is 7in high. So you probably don't want to keep any kind of fish like Tetras. Endlers would be better suited but just barely. I would only keep a handful of males because they're going to breed heavily.
Since it's an incredibly shallow tank, that means there will be more predation on any shrimp you have than if the tank were taller and there were more hiding spots for shrimp. So keep that in mind, as well.
As far as lighting goes during emersed growth? Just raise it if it's too intense. Can also use layers of window screen placed on top of the tank to dim the lighting.
About Dwarf Hair Grass... since your tank is just 7in high and you'll likely have 1-2in of substrate, that only gives you 5in or so of vertical space in the water column. Depending upon the DHG variety you get, it'll be probably a minimum of 2in tall. Leaves you with 3-4in of useful vertical water column space. Not great for fish. Shrimp would work fine.
If you want fish? I'd consider plants that can be kept much shorter.
Seiryu stone will likely impact your water hardness quite a bit in a small tank like that. You'll need to do some testing with your particular stone in order to know how much. I mention that because it's potentially problematic for shrimp if you aren't sure how it will behave in your setup. The easiest way to test is to soak the stone in a bucket of water for 2-3 weeks to and measure gH, kH, TDS, that sort of thing on a regular basis.
Unless you're doing it for aesthetic reasons, Eco Complete is inert. There's nothing special about it. It's also not always great for carpeting plants like Dwarf Hair Grass because of its size and weight and the scale may be a bit too large for a tank as small as the 60F. But that's up to you. If you want black, consider any number of black sands on the market. Or even smaller crushed lava rock. With EC, you're just paying for branding. You could get enough sand or crushed lava for far less than $10. If you already have EC on-hand, then it obviously makes sense. But if you don't? Encourage you to shop around.
Twinstar Sterilizer is generally a waste of money for a number of reasons.
The 60F is 7in high. So you probably don't want to keep any kind of fish like Tetras. Endlers would be better suited but just barely. I would only keep a handful of males because they're going to breed heavily.
Since it's an incredibly shallow tank, that means there will be more predation on any shrimp you have than if the tank were taller and there were more hiding spots for shrimp. So keep that in mind, as well.
As far as lighting goes during emersed growth? Just raise it if it's too intense. Can also use layers of window screen placed on top of the tank to dim the lighting.
About Dwarf Hair Grass... since your tank is just 7in high and you'll likely have 1-2in of substrate, that only gives you 5in or so of vertical space in the water column. Depending upon the DHG variety you get, it'll be probably a minimum of 2in tall. Leaves you with 3-4in of useful vertical water column space. Not great for fish. Shrimp would work fine.
If you want fish? I'd consider plants that can be kept much shorter.
Seiryu stone will likely impact your water hardness quite a bit in a small tank like that. You'll need to do some testing with your particular stone in order to know how much. I mention that because it's potentially problematic for shrimp if you aren't sure how it will behave in your setup. The easiest way to test is to soak the stone in a bucket of water for 2-3 weeks to and measure gH, kH, TDS, that sort of thing on a regular basis.
