60l journal!

This will be my 2ft. journal.

I started this tank the past weekend. I broke down my 3ft. as i wanted something smaller. I used 50% of the water from the 3ft. and also the same filter. I'm testing for amonia and nitrites every day and all is good!

The tank dimensions are 60 x 32 x 32 if i remember correctly?! I have a very small canister rated at 200lph but i don't think it even does that! i have another tiny pump in there for some more circulation.

The substrate consists of home made clay balls, sera plant substrate(Experimenting with this), silica sand and all caped with gravel.

The plants consists of some java fern(the narrow leaf one), anubias, indian fern, java moss and some more of witch i cant remember the name's. The fish are my trio of apisto's and 7 head and tail light tetra's.

I found some otto's at one of the pet shop, will it be ok if i add two of these?

The lighting consists of one sera plant light and on daylight. 40w all together.

Comments welcome!

Schalk

sorry here are the pics!

 

Nice set up.
That canister is a Boyu isn't it? I got the same running on my Nano. Does an excellent job in my opinion.

 

Yes Zoom its the boyu one with the uv light. I can imagine that it would be perfect for a nano, but i would have liked a bit higher flow rate. I realy don't believe that its 200lph going thru there! But i have a very small pump a bit bigger than a match box that does most of the water movement!

Schalk

 

The nice thing about that Boyu is that even though it's only doing 200lph, it's actually got a huge surface area for filtration to occur. Which to me is a bit more important than having huge masses of water blowing through the tank.

Do yourself a favour... monitor your nitrates for 3 weeks. (I'm assuming this tank is pretty much cycled and settled). When you do your water change, check the Nitrates. Then check it again on day 7 just before you do your W/C. Just after W/C check it again. You may actually find that little canister is coping pretty well. You might find it isn't. Would be interested to see the results.

 

now, the big question here is, do you use that desk for working or for looking at fish?

coz with a tank that nice, i would'nt even see a PC screen on that desk

 

Nice, I was looking at that Sera Substrate the other day, how is it?



PS, do you drive a silver Jetta?

 

nice tank man.. think u need a reflector for those lamps?

 

Ok Zoom my nitrit's are at 0,0 mg/l. the ph is at 6.5.

I'm not planing on doing any water changes in this tank as i have to top up with about 500ml per day(open top tank). I will do a kh and gh test now and post the results.

I also added the reflectors today and it made a huge deference!

All in all everything is doing great and it seems that the boyu filter is not doing so bad, surprising me actually! will keep this post updated with pics!

Schalk

 

Ok my total hardness (GH) is 7dGH and the carbonate hardness (KH) is 4dKH.

Schalk

 

I've used it before. The problem is that it needes to be replaced every 12 months. But it works like a bomb!

Yes, that little canister has surprized me too!

The total hardness sounds a bit high for your area? I thought you suffered from too soft water down there.

 

Zoom im using dsd and there is a plant hardening mix in there that the prof sells for his clients in the western cape with the soft water so maybe that pushed it up? Could it be?

 

As far as I recall from reading the professor's stuff that he sends with his DSD is that the Cape water is 2dgH, and if you add his hardening mix according to his calcs, you should get 4dgH. I don't use his hardening mix because out water is 6dgH in JHB. Maybe you could look into this? Not sure if it's a problem though... was just curious as why you had such high gH when you in the Cape.

 

I'm not to botherd. Will like it to come down to 4 but I'm not breaking my head over it. Mayby its an inacurate test kit. I'm using the sera one...

 

I wouldn't stress over it either.
Also check the date on that test kit. Mine was expired, and gave me hugely inaccurate readings.

 

---------- Post added at 18:10 ---------- Previous post was at 18:10 ----------

ok guys... not much have changed but the quadricostatus spread nicely and i'm going to fill up the whole back of the tank with the indian water fern... just some quick pictures.

 

I think it is time for an update...:idea:

It has been around 3 months and ALOT has changed, infact the only things left from the old tank is the substrate and the E.Quadricostatus witch i realy badley want to get rid of! The stuff is like duck weed! Any way, The tank moved to the kitchen counter and i am bussy with a cabinet for the tank and when it is finished I will maybe move things around a bit.

I do not have any fish in the tank at the moment because I am stil playing around with the co2 and do not want to send some fish to the gas chamber.

The specs again:
Tank: 60l
Lights: 2x20w t8's (sera plant light and a ali.M extra daylight bulb)
Substrate: Sera flora depot caped with some cheap gravel
Filtration: Aquaclear 30
Co2: pressurized at 1bps on a timer with the lights, defused via glass defuser.
Ferts: Profs DSD( Used sera range before, DSD is the best by far!)

Feel free to ask if i left anything out.

And now for the eye candy:





Thats it for now.

Schalk

 

that tank looks soo green. Moss is growing well I see, is it flame moss or java?

 

looks like java