My Freecycle tank 55g!

gringostar9 said:

Looks beautiful. Good work.

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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?

GitMoe said:

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...

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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 said:

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.
:thumbsup:

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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 said:

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...

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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. :frown: 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/concentration-solution/milligrams-per-liter-to-parts-per-million-ppm-conversion.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. :icon_neut

F22 said:

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

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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

A link to some of my fat fish hanging out! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaFn3m-fdxQ#t=00m13s

This is how I changed the light:



I glued the little strip of scrap aluminum using epoxy for a little more light reflection into the tank since the inside of the hood is black plastic.

These 2 bulbs come with the light:


model # of the Lithonia lighting mini strip:



The only thing different looking about the hood after replacing the light (other then the brightness) are 2 little screw holes that I'm sure you can paint black using some black nailpolish since spray paint would probably be way too messy and time consuming.



Total time to remove/replace new light was about 15-20 minutes.

I haven't changed much other than increasing the amount of time between dosing Seachem Flourish and more frequent water changes. I use my nose to tell me when I should change the water. As soon as I start to catch a whiff of that fishy odor it's time for a change. I also try to use the stringy algae to give myself an idea of if I am overdosing my tank with Flourish.

Food regiment:
I crush up 3 Hikari Wheat Germ medium floating pellets using my thumb by pressing one at a time on the rim of the tank and then I grind them in between my fingers. I find this provides all sorts of size food for the adults and the various stages of endler fry. All the fish gobble up the food so fast that the water doesn't really get a chance to get cloudy and I'm sure my tadpole snails, MTS snails, Red Cherry Shrimp, and 2 Otocinclus are vaccuming up anything that might settle on the flora. By the time I have my fingers in a Hikari Tropical Micro pellet bag, there is just a film of very fine hikari wheat germ dust that the fry are working on while the adult females look like they are filter feeding from the surface constantly sucking at the film on the surface. I've found that following this routine has decreased the amount of bearded algae on the gravel and leaves since the otos and guppies pick at them all day long. At first I tried to feed my fish 3x a day to make sure the fry have enough food, then I overfed my fish once a day to make sure the skittish CPDs got a chance at eating, now I basically feed my fish twice a day giving them as much as they can eat until food starts dropping past them and hitting the gravel since the CPDs have gotten aggressive at making sure they get their fair share.

I keep wanting to feed my fish less but I'm worried the fry won't develop properly if they are malnourished although even they look like their bellies are about to explode.

Here are some updated pics:


update_oct-31-2010 by mikeytitan, on Flickr

I've been thinning out the tank and transplanted all the hornwort to my breeder tank underneath is and about 2/3rd of the brazillian pennywort as well. I added some dwarf hairgrass to the tank (left side) that I got from another planted tank forum member from a trade (endler pair + fry for a few nodes of DHG, and I also bought a different kind of dwarf hairgrass from petco that I planted on the left side). I also need to stop using wysteria cuttings as midground plants since they almost triple in height in about 11 days in my tank if they get direct light from atleast 1 T12 bulb for plants from Home Depot. I also moved all the remnants of a few sprigs of Baby Tears to the breeder tank.


fishtankprogress_september-to-oct31_2010 by mikeytitan, on Flickr

30 gallon Breeder Tank


DSC_0128 by mikeytitan, on Flickr

Oh yea the net is in the breeder tank because I was using it to hold down mosquito larvae close to the bottom. The CPDs go in and out of it slowly eating all the larvae. I figured this will reduce the chances of a larvae turning into a mosquitoe since the CPDs stay close to the bottom of the breeder tank doing their courting as opposed to the CPDs in the 55 gallon tank which stay near the surface by the Java moss that I have on top of the Spray bar.

30 gallon Breeder Tank



This temporary makeshift egg trap was a disasterous idea!!!!! I can't emphasize enough how curious CPDs are. At first my CPDs kind of kept away from it but after they got used to its presence a male decided that the holes in the mesh were big enough to get through. I thought it was amusing watching the crafty alpha male daring in and out of the mesh until the next morning I only counted 1 female, 3 males in the tank hanging out and found a female stuck in the mesh. She got in, must have eaten a few mosquito larvae and was too fat to get out. I had to surgically remove the mesh around her using a fingernail clipper and then sever the net around her so she could get out. Right now the female has what looks like a indented ring around her and some scraped off scales from the top of her head but she has been eating and swimming around as if nothing happened. This happened yesterday morning so we'll see. I hope she doesn't perish.