Scott's Planted Aquarium

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The plants arrived in excellent condition, and I'm fairly pleased with the variety provided and layout I've achieved.  There should be a good variance in size, color, and leaf type throughout the tank.  Assuming all goes well and the plants all settle in nicely, it'll still take a while for this tank to 'grow into' itself.   This is because a lot of these plants have not reached full growth yet.  The plants are generally arranged in the tank according to how big or tall they are expected to get - taller ones in the back - medium sided ones in the middle, or 'midground,' and the smaller ones in the front, or foreground.  The plants I got, however, are all about the same size.  Some of them will get taller, some won't.  Over time, the 'background' plants in this tank should grow up and fill in that empty space at the back of the tank.  It will also take a little while for all the plants to recover their natural shapes and appearances after having been shipped in a box; a lot of the bunch plants are still somewhat 'flat' from the packing.Next week's picture should hopefully be somewhat clearer.  (Saturday Morning note:  The Limnophilia sessiliflora has 'fluffed out' very nicely already, and is looking really good.)

I've still got a fair amount of 'bare gravel' across the front of the tank - I'm hoping the little grassy plants (Japanese Fans or Japanese Rushes - Acorus Pusillus - one ones in front of the 'stump') will kick in and start spreading around

While I was working on the plants, I was also rearranging the filtration.  I picked up some additional hose, and was able to move the cannister inlet to the opposite end of the tank from the return.  I tried using the cannister spraybar - but it 'whistled' in the most annoying way, so I'm back to just having the output run 'bare.'  I'll probably experiment with this a bit more before it's over.   For a little while I was running the big cannister filter and the HOT Magnum at the same time (with the micron cartridge in the Magnum) - and this was creating a lot of water movement, so the whole tank was 'waving in the breeze.'  The fish were having a blast, ducking around all the plants, diving under leaves and into bushes, playing in the current from the filters, and so forth.  (Saturday note:  I let the Magnum run overnight and pulled it this morning, as it wasn't making any apparent difference.)

CO2 continues to be an issue in the tank.  The yeast generator is working fine - and the CO2 reactor I built was doing a beautiful job - but I kept having trouble with it.  It would come loose and float away, or the powerhead would back up and stop pumping, or whatever - and it was frankly ugly.  When I modified the 'stump' to be a planter, I tried to also fix it to act as a CO2 reactor inside (hooked up a powerhead to pump water inside and keep the CO2 churned up).  The jury's still out - but I don't think it's working too well.  I'm going to have to think up something else again.  My original reactor really did work quite nicely, so I'm fairly seriously considering taking what I've learned and designing a new one that will hopefully avoid some of the problems of the old one, and be more compact and less ugly.  Of course - if I can get the plants to grow the way I like - ugly reactors won't be an issue because I'll have plenty of plants to hide things behind...  ;-)

Sunday Update!

I've worked up a map of the new layout.   See below...

On the other hand, the tank clarified sometime Saturday, after I took the HOT Magnum off.  It still isn't perfect - but it's cleaner and clearer than it's been in weeks - I was really beginning to think it would never clear up.  It would appear that the HOT Magnum simply was not up to the task on it's own - even with dual Bio-Wheel PRO 60's.  So now my filtration has settled into the following.  One Rena Filstar XP3 with inlet and outlet at opposite ends of the tank; and a Pengin 1140 powerhead with sponge prefilter running two Bio-Wheel PRO 60's (that's four very large Bio Wheels, for those who are curious).  The Penguin and the Filstar Intake are right next to each other, so the tank has some decent water turnover in filtration - but the plants aren't stirred up too much, I don't think...

I am considering putting in a big powerhead in the front of the tank with one of those mechanical flow switchers, to get some gentle 'wave action' going - I think it would be really cool to have the whole tank gently waving back and forth, but I don't know if it's a good idea or not....

Anyway - at least for the moment, I think the tank is just gorgeous.  Now let's see if I can keep it that way. 

I've also started moving fish back into the big tank from the "Hospice" tank....  We'll just have to see how it goes.  The angelfish went first, and were immediately facinated with the baby mollies...  The baby mollies rather abruptly became very facinated in the hiding places offered by all those plants.   I think this tank is going to be quite a busy place for a while...

Clicking on the "Map" picture above will give you a very large, high-resolution image of the tank if you're interested in good, close-up detail.  That image has been color-corrected to much more closely match what the tank really looks like; it's much more green/yellow than the pictures I've been posting. The camera I'm using tends to color-adjust and add a lot of blue, which looks good on the web page and brings out some detail better.  However, I'm using 6500kelvin lights, so IRL the tank is much more yellow-green than these pictures would suggest.

Signing off for the weekend...

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