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Just got back form a five day vacation to Vancouver. All was fine and dandy when I got back and it was my first time leaving the new tank alone. I also ended up adding 20 Corydoras sterbai, 10 PFR and 10 tiger shrimp to my quarantine. I wasn't around to pick bodies if need be (had a Canadian Aquatics order shipped in) but all was well tonight. Picked out a single shrimp but I can live with that. Also added some plants tonght: Bacopa caroliniana Blyxa japonica Hygrophila sp. 'Araguaia' Juncus repens ????? Limnophila aromatica Ludwigia brevipes Ludwigia inclinata Ludwigia repens x L. arcuata ?????? Ranunculus inundatus Staurogyne stolonifera ??????? Hygrophila pinnatifida Eriocaulon sp. 'Goias' PROSERPINACA PALUSTRIS Pogostemon erectus Ludwigia inclinata var verticillata 'Cuba'

Excel can be hard on Vals. Crypts too, but less often. Try to keep the co2 level consistent and not on for a few weeks and then off of a couple days. Algae can creep in when you stop using it as the plants need to readjust. You want to have the co2 running the whole photoperiod. I usually turn it on an hour before the lights and off and hour before the lights go off. It gives the co2 a chance to build up, and later dissapate. You'll also want to trim off any dead or rotting leaves. They will only hold the plant back as they try to repair instead of regrow and the dead plant matter will hurt the water quality.

Smaller bottles is about all you can do but you'll run out of sugar faster. DIY is a pain. If you are going to have co2 for more than two years a pressurized system is probably a good investment. Sugar ain't cheap and there's a lot of maintanence.

My reply to a fellow who asked me about dosing EI to a 25 gallon. He is planning on using a two bulb T5HO fixture and I though I should share my reply with everyone: Two t5ho bulbs may be way too much light for that tank. Look at the fixture from the bottom so you can see the bulb and the reflector. Can you see clear reflections of the bulb in the reflector, like a mirror, or multiple mirrors? If so, the the reflector is likely decent or even good and you will have a lot of light. It may be best to run only one bulb or alternate one for 4 hours and the other for 4 hours to get more even spread. You could also raise the light up so it's not so bright. I'm quite good at planted tanks and I wouldn't use two bulbs over that tank without raising the fixture quite high as it's simply too hard to keep algae at bay. Most people disregard this advice, but they usually pay for that mistake. If the reflectors are bad, however, you may be okay. Even with the single light you will want good, high co2 levels so you don't limit the plants with all that growth the lights will cause. EI dosing is very easy, and the easiest to get right. It's much harder to dose 'lean' and get things right unless you have much experience. By the time you notice a deficiency it's gotten bad. 20~40gal 50% H20 change-weekly 1/4 Tsp-KN03 3x a week 1/16 Tsp-KH2P04 3x aweek 1/2 Tsp-GH booster once a week 5ml or 1/16Tsp-Trace 3x a week Optional 1-2ml-Fe/Iron 3x a week Simply dose the trace and iron one day and the other three the next. If your water is hard like mine you can probably skip the GH booster. Just measuring spoons and dose the salts dry into the tank, or mix them in water. It can be tough to measure out 1/16 of a spoon so you can put say a full tsp into 160ml of water and dose 10ml per day. You can mix everything but the trace, although I've heard you can mix them all. Make sure you do your 50% or more water change each week so nothing builds up. You dose more than your plants need so you never limit one nutrient. You always want to limit plant growth with light. It's a mistake when people thing their bad growth is due to light, especially with t5ho. You only need AT MOST two bulbs for up to around 24" of height. The only reason you'd want 3rd or 4th bulbs is when the tank is very wide front to back and the single or double bulbs leave the front and back of the tank dim. The issue 9.9 times out of ten is low/ no co2. Next it's lack of ferts, usually when they have a dirt substrate and think dosing is redundant. Usually it is but sometimes you can lack in a certain fert. Lastly you may have too little light, but more often than not people have too much light for the amount of ferts and namely co2 they have. This causes the plants to try to grow, but they don't have the nutrients and food to do so. Think of a bodybuilder who lifts heavy and is growing big and strong fast. If they eat lots of protein and food (ferts) and get lots of rest (co2) they grow fast from lifting weights (light). If you take away the good food they will be okay for a while, while the body pulls from fat stores, etc. It may take a few weeks to see issues. If food is good, but sleep is not, they will get fatigued quickly, they will stunt, get sick, etc., quickly as the body can't recover, yet is still being pushed by lifting weights. This is why co2 is so important and the hardest variable to get right. Light is easy. Generally a single bulb will grow most anything. Two will for sure if you have even a deep tank. Ferts are easy as you can EI dose and forget about it. Feeding fish is actually harder. Co2 is touch to get a feel for. Too little and plants grow less than well. Too much and you can gas your tank.

"Bonsai can be created from nearly any perennial woody-stemmed tree or shrub species[4] that produces true branches and can be cultivated to remain small through pot confinement with crown and root pruning." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai It's not all about trimming. And the use of fertilizer to keep it small?? The container matters very much.

Look at Bonsai. The whole technique revolves around that idea.

Check it out. Sorry it's dim and grainy, The lights were dimming and only barely still on. Feeding Frenzy vid!

How much to concrete counter tops weigh? I have them, and my landlord poured them in the garage and carried them in later. Haha, just saying I'm not sure that it's a fair comparison. Those i-joists look flimsy, but they most certainly are not. Engineered beams... they don't mess around. I challenge anyone to try and snap a 1' by 10' particle board when it's standing on end.

You should measure floor to ceiling in the basement and check for levelness before and after you fill the tank, and after a few months. If the floor sags I would invest in some jacks.

No, because the plants don't grow without the full line of nutrients. It's like making pancakes... If you need two eggs for the recipie, bu only have one egg, you can only make a half batch regardless of how much milk, flour, etc., you have. The only thing you want to limit plant growth is light. Fertilizer and most importantly, and I can't stress this enough, co2 need to be in excess. There is a ceiling for light, where if you supply more you are not able to inject enough co2 because you will gas your fish, or simply can't dissolve that much co2 into he water. EI is designed to supply enough nutrient up to a realistic ceiling for co2 and thus light. Too much light is easy these days. You can see it it many people's tanks where plants are stunted or not ideal specimens, because they insist on no co2 or ferts, but have too much light. One t5ho over a 20 or 30 gallon tank usually warrants co2 injection. One t5ho bulb over a 75 gallon, with good reflectors, co2 and ferts should be enough light to grow all but the absolutely most light demanding plants. I personally do 50% water changes once a week regardless. At minimum I aim for 30% once a week. So switching for me wasn't too bad. You always do modified EI for lower light/ low tech setups. I'll find the regime and post it up.

Pfft. Plants gotta eat too!

It's actually quite incredible how much cheaper dry ferts are. It would cost me nearly $100 per month to dose my tank with flourish ferts. Instead, with dry, it's about $50 per year.

EI stands for estimative index. It's a method of dosig fertilizer where you dose enough so that all the needed ferts for plants are in excess of what they will use. You do a 50% water change once a week to reset the levels. It's pretty much fool proof to make sure you don't stund your plants. Most people with any aftermarket light fixture have lots of light, so I you use EI all that's really left for you to screw up is co2. Ferts don't cause algae. Light and lack of co2 cause algae, due to stunting plant growth and allowing algae to take hold. Step one: find container of ferts under stand. Step two: level off a measuring spoon. (if you've ever made pancakes or taken cough syrup, you are good to go) Step three: invert measuring spoon OVER the aquarium where it will land IN the water. Ferts on a glass top won't do anything. Repeat 6x per week. Or less if you like. EI isn't really only for high light tanks. But you can scale I back to about 50% for "low tech" setups.

People always say to me (beginners): I don't want to do EI because it seems too complicated. I simply say, EI covers all your bases do you don't have to think about it. How are you going to figure out what you NEED to dose, without essentially doing EI (so you have perfectly healthy baseline) and backing off until you see a deficiency? You can't work up, or you wont know if the bad growth is from one nutrient lacking, or another. You could see a deficiency and it be caused by the lack of another nutrient causing limited uptake of the nutrient you think is deficient.

I would probably give it a couple weeks to get used to submerged growth. If it dies back I'd give it a hack to remove the melting. You don't want all that dead plant matter in there. Chances are there won't be much though, if co2 is good. Start one co2'bottle about a week early and the other the day before you fill to get consistent levels and no glitch in co2. Two bottle may be too much down the road when you add fish, but you can adjust the recipie later. Lots of gas is good for the transition. You may be okay I you have the sump running. I'm up to around 45-50ppm in my tank, which with a canister would be really pushing it. With a sump you get more oxygen do you can push a little more co2. It's also depends on the stocking level of the tank. Sounds like you have things under control. If you find you are getting algae you may have to raise that light up some. For a ten gallon a few spiral fluorescents is usually enough. You probably have very high light. The 8 hour period will help. Looks good. Healthy growth too.

Do you have co2 ready for the tansition? Don't want to roast all your hard work. The fill in will actually be faster flooded, but submerged growth has somewhat shallow roots and tends to uproot after the hc gets thick. You want to be thorough with the trimming. Take it right down to the substrate every three weeks or so, or after it gets thick. If not, you won't be able to maintain it. Also, co2 is much more important for good growth than light. Nowadays, most people have more light than they need. Almost any stock tank with t5ho has more light than most can handle effectively. Dual t5ho all but nessitates co2 injection. With good co2, hc will grow with around 40umol of par at the substrate. This is less than one t5ho bulb with good reflectors over most tanks.

Pic one is cryptocoryne wendtii 'green'. Pic two may be a Lilaeopsis species on the left, java fern on the right. Make sure the java fern rhizome isn't in the substrate or you'll kill it. Tie it to a rock or wood with cotton thread, elastic band, etc. Pic three is java moss, cryptocorne wendtii "brown and looks like a few hurting stems of Egeria densa on the right. These are the three closest plants to the viewer from left to right. Co2 is the king s*** of planted tanks. If it grows well without it, it grow way better with it. The plants you can keep without co2 injection are limited, but you don't need pressurized. You can use the DIY method, with pop bottles, sugar and yeast. Although in the long run, DIY is more expensive with the price of sugar. You generally use around 2-3 cups per week of sugar. Pressurized is around $200 to $300 to start up and around $20 a year for refills for smaller tanks. Excel isn't co2, but a liquid carbon source (glutaraldehyde). Excel helps, but isn't even similar to the results you get from co2 gas. If you want a lush tank with no gas, stick to easy plants like Java fern, moss, crypts, anubias and a few of the weedier stems like hygro, some rotalas, etc. It takes longer to grow them, but you technically can have the same end result if you choose species that do well in your setup.

That was my filter, right? Describe the noise a bit more if you can. I've had it make a little noise, but nothing loud. Is is a hum, or a chatter like it's chewing sand or something? I'd pull the filter floss, that's just going to clog the filter faster. Also, you added the lava to what was there? There was a lot of media in that thing to start. If you're keeping it that full keep on top of the cleaning cause that's a lot of media to pull through. Those filters are designed to be more biological than anything else. Filter floss really clogs too fast to be of any use in a filter unless you specifically need to clear cloudy water and whatnot. I never use floss. Maybe a sponge here and there, but even my 165 ONLY has bioballs. Not mech and it's crystal clear.

Yeah, I read that too. Also read they are stream dwellers. Not sure how they get to salt water if they are in swamps, unless they are brackish.

I thought streams and rivers. I believe they move down to estuaries to breed, thus the need for brackish water for the young to survive.

CRS don't need brackish water to breed. Quite the opposite actually, they need very soft water with low tds. RCS or cherry shrimp hardly need water. They breed like cockroaches. Rili shrimp are another selective breed of cherries, and typically cost a touch less than painted fire reds. Sakura shrimp are low grade painted fire reds.

If you had this in the for sale section you might get more hits.

What are you after? Pool filter sand is a tan colour and pretty clean from the bag. Plus it would cost around $30 for your whole tank. It's fairly light and doesn't compact too much. I second ADA being the best. If you are even half decent and growing plants ADA will more than pull its weight. I also use flourite, but it's inert. Hold nutrients well after some time though, just doesn't come with any.

Thanks boss. I'd love to enter it, hopefully it turns out well enough! I've just about got enough growth to start moving things around. It's all seiryu stone. Haha, yep, the big ones are yours. I just added them a few days ago so they are still being wimps. You think I need eight more? That's gonna be a big school when they are all grow'd up. I've got 50 blue tetras holding at Harold's for pickup and 20 corydoras sterbai coming at the end of the month. I also need to add a handful of ottos and there's around 18 Amano shrimp in the tank. Also have a breeding group candy striped dwarf plecos for the tank as well as a galaxy and a few others. I'm going to stock it a little slow because I need very well oxygenated water for those roselines. The sump was a good idea for that reason, and I'm cranking the co2 and so far all is well. I'll also be adding colony of painted fire red and also tiger shrimp if they do well in tap water.