Sickly and Bored

I have been fighting off a cold for the past couple of days and my bouts of being awake are filled with feverish boredom! There are plenty of things I should and could be doing around my house, but just haven't been feeling up to cleaning and organizing. A job I detest when I am well, so definitely not something I am going to spend a sick day doing. So I decided I would write something here.

One of the projects that I have in the works right now is a planted community fish tank. I have been keeping aquariums for over twenty years and enjoy the challenges that they offer. Currently I have three fish tanks in operation and two hospital tanks. Two tanks house a variety of cichlids, which I won't focus on in this post. The third tank is the community tank, which was a departation from my norm. The smaller hospital tank houses a single silver tipped tetra that had a bout of fungus and is just about ready to rejoin the community tank.

A couple of years ago I got bored with the ugly rocky look of the cichlid tanks and tried to add some plants to the aqua scape to beautify the tanks. Yes, I did know that most people wouldn't even think of adding plants to cichlid tanks due to their destructive nature, but wanted to attempt the process so that I could better the water quality through the use of live plants. I was able to keep the plants alive for about a month and than would find during the morning feeding that the cichlids had decided enough was enough and had uprooted all the plants. I had a 29 gallon aquarium that became available, so I decided on a planted community tank.

The tank has a base layer of flourite substrate with 1/2" egg crate on top of this layer. The egg crate helps to stabilize the base layer so the fish and water movement doesn't mix or over turn the substrate. The plants are anchored with the egg crate which helps to stabilize them as well. The egg crate is covered with Tahitian moon sand, which provides a very nice tank floor.

The sides of the tanks are planted, with different plant species. On the left I have, um...yeah I really can't remember what I planted in the tank, but they are doing well. In the back of the tank I planted several of those bulbs that you can buy in the package to grow. Word of advice, don't waste your money buy plants that have already been started and cost a little more. Of all the bulbs I have planted, two have grown and quickly died. In the center of the tank I have a couple pieces of driftwood (one artificial and one real), a rock and two small clay pots on their sides. Side note, unglazed clay pots make excellent hiding places in aquariums, just make sure to sterilize and clean the pots before you add them to your tank.

Filtration in the tank is nothing special, just a standard hang on the back filter that I have had for years. The filter is located on the left side of the tank. On the right side of the tank I have a heater and a venturi power head. The power-head does a good job keeping the tank well mixed. In the venturi port I have the CO2 line from the fermenter. Since I wanted to tackle a planted aquarium and was on a budget I built a yeast fermenter to produce the needed CO2. Now that I can keep the plants alive I am looking at going to an automated CO2 system to help control the pH of the tank better. Yes, leave it to an engineer to fully automate all of his fish tanks. I have tried various ways to introduce the CO2 into the fish tank and have found the power head method to work the best. The bubble size is extremely small and most of the bubbles get absorbed. The only problem I have had is with the CO2 tube getting plugged with some nasty white gunk at the power head which typically can be cleaned out with a pipe cleaner.

Tank lighting is provided with a florescent hood that has an aquatic bulb and is on a 14 hour 'daylight' cycle. The use of a timer is really important when working with a CO2 enriched planted tank. The pH level will get lower when the light is off since the plants are not using as much CO2. This can be dealt with by either cutting back the duration of the dark cycle or by reducing the CO2 that enters the tank when the light is off. I have also wondered about using an air pump on the night cycle to increase the oxygen level of the water at night but haven't seen any noticeable problems with the pH level. Night lighting is provided by four blue LED aqua spotlights which help keep the tank from being completely dark.

That is the tank setup, now for the fish. The main population is made up of silver tipped tetras, six of them. A hearty active fish that seem to do well in my setup. They originally had some tiger barbs for tank mates but the war between tetras and barbs resulted in the complete population of tiger barbs to be killed. There is a gang of three bronze Cory Cats to eat up the excess food and to scour the bottom of the tank. Recently I added two Fire Dwarf Gourami and they appear to be doing well. I had a clown loach in the tank to keep the snail population under control (yes you will always have snails when you have plants), but he failed to do well and eventually died when he got a major case of ich.