A Bumpy Road

Hi All,
 
I started a new tank and wanted to share my journeys in aquarium development.  I hope that at least one person out there will be able to avoid some of the mis-steps I make along the way; I also hope to gather some advice and info from others who have successfully overcome the challenges I face.
 
THE GOAL: A planted tank where the fish are happy and healthy, and the plants are wholly sustained by the organic by-products of fish and food waste.  With NO algae.
 
My 125 gallon tank was started in August 2013, 6 months ago.  As you can see by this photo I still have a long way to go:

 
 
The Beginning
 
So I picked up a 125 gallon tank setup on Craigs List, including stand, lighting, filters, air pumps and stones, heaters, powerheads, plus several other assorted and sundry items.  Everything I needed to start my own home aquarium, except some gravel and some fish!  The young couple who sold it to me also kindly included a tupperware container holding a few teeny-tiny snails, telling me that these "wonderful little creatures" will burrow around in the gravel, increasing the overall health of my tank by breaking down fish wastes.  Malaysian Trumpet Snails.  More on these "wonderful little creatures" later.
 
The next day I filled the tank and dumped  $120 worth of white sand in, and hooked up one of the two Magnum 350 cannister filters.  I also scoured the woods in my area for nice-looking rocks, scoured the rocks themselves, and soaked them in a diluted bleach solution for 2 hours in a large cooler. The rocks were then rinsed and arranged in the tank.  After unexpectedly spending so much on sand, I was NOT gonna buy rocks, No way! I also added a couple of small pieces of driftwood that the seller had also provided.  All in all a busy day, but the tank was looking very clean and beautiful, if a little bare.
 
The next day I hooked up one of the air pumps and one of the heaters, and spent another $60 on plastic aquarium plants.  I started thinking "what's the point of saving money on a used tank set-up if I'm gonna foolishly spend on *sand* and *plastic thingies*"??  So i felt a little ridiculous but this massive aquascape churning away in my office filled me with hope and aspirations, and I was happy anyway.
 
On day four I remembered the snails sitting in their tupperware for three-and-a-half days, un-heated, no oxygenation, no nutirition.  I thought "Oh My God, these poor things are probably dead, but I HAVE to at least give them a chance!"  And I dumped them into the tank.
 
More in my next post.
 

Small Fish, Big Tank
 
After about 10 days of running the tank with no fish, I decided that a couple of guppies swimming around in there would help get the cycle going.  I didnt really know about local fish stores in my neighborhood yet, so I went to a nearby Pet Smart to pick out the intrepid pilgrims for the New World in my office.  So I'm looking at the store's fancy guppy tank, and they looked good, healthy.  Tanks were clean, even their feeder guppies looked healthy, but I wanted the fancy tailed ones.  So I'm there scoping out the guppies and a store employee comes over to help.  I said something to the effect of having set up a new tank, and neeeding some "canaries for the coal mine."  Now this gets interesting - when I asked for 5, she said she could only sell me two for now, but if I brought a water sample in about a week, she could test it for me and see if it was good enough for more.  Okay, so I told her that I have a larger-sized tank, and I wanted more than 2 to start it off.  She insisted that she couldn't sell me them.  And I can't believe how much that annoyed me.  So I said "you'll sell as many feeder guppies as someone wants and happily send them off to a tragic death, but you won' sell me the fancy tails I want because my water hasn't met with your approval?"  Then I walked out of the store in a huff.
 
In retrospect I feel stupid about getting so annoyed; after all, she was just trying to ensure that their fish were going to decent homes.  Still, that annoyed thecrap out of me.  As if I didn't know what I was doing!  How dare she doubt me!  As it turns out, I didn't know what I was doing.  The half dozen guppies I picked up from another place lived unhappily in the tank for about 4 weeks, half died and the others were looking worse for the wear.  I kept a daily log of the ammonia and pH levels in the tank, and the general look of each guppy's health, and checked off whether or not each one ate something.  I wrestled with the pH on a daily basis, adding scoop after scoop of a pH-lowering buffer.  I added even more guppies after a while, and somewhere along the line I dropped a couple of green corys in the tank as well.
 
It was disastrous cycling all-in-all.  Mistakes I made:
 
1) I was impatient, and I knew it.  I thought I could jump-start the tank by virtue of its sheer size compared to the boi-mass of the fish in it.  I even used some of the old filter media left in the filter I hooked up - it was still damp so I figured that would be enough to turbo-charge my cycling.  I know now that it takes time for the nitrAtes to build up, and that even if I had some beneficial bacteria in the filter there were no nitrAtes to feed it at the time.
 
2) Wrestling with the pH.  The pH went down, it went up, it went down, it went up, as did my stress levels, as did the guppies' stress levels.  Terrible idea to try to make it work.  With 125 gallons of water you need a LOT of pH buffering stuff to change it.  I finally decided to Hell with the pH!  I will acclimate my fish to tank's pH, instead of the other way 'round.  And see how THAT works.  And you know what?  It works just fine. Just an fyi I am on well water here that's at about 7.8-8.0 pH, and the water is hard.  And yes I picked up another piece of driftwood but it didn't noticeably change the pH in a tank this size.  I think would need a friggin tree stump to make a difference that way.
 
In the end I did finally get the tank properly cycled, stabilized the pH (by doing NOTHING about it), and had a few worn-out looking guppies.  But the corys were fantastic!  Like little Timex's - they take an licking and keep on ticking.  It's now 6 months later and they're still fine and dandy!  Theguppies are long gone though - I eventually brought them to a local fish store and asked them to give them a good home.  I was ready to move on to the next phase...

its all about learning from your mistakes - fishless cycling is the way forward - looks like your on the right track now though ill look forward to seeing the tank develop

That's very true, too true.  Thanks for the encouragement looking-glass

no worries keep the pics coming

Am enjoying reading your story! The first one I was like NO. YOU CAN'T STOP THERE!!

This has nothing to do with the tank story but i'm putting a picture here just to make it a little interesting.
 

ha ha nice fish

Wonderful Little Creatures
 
Yea.  Remember when I mentioned Malaysian Trumpet Snails, and that there would be "more on that later"?  Well, in this post I return to that subject.  Along with the tank setup, the seller had kindly provided a tupperware containing about 5 teeny-tiny snails, and I had left them in my fish cabinet for three and a half days while I got the tank all going.  When I first dumped these little guys into my tank I was feeling pretty guilty.  Turns out I shouldn't have worried.  At all.
 
In my newly cycled tank I had moved on from guppies to common angelfish, and it was all going swimmingly.  I was pleased to see that even the Malaysian Trumpet Snail tribe had made it through, and it brought me great satisfication to see the occasional little snail here and there, helping to process fish waste in my substrate.  I saved their lives!  I observed that at night a few of them would emerge from under the sand and make a pilgrimage all the way to the top of tank, and then eventually drop off and be gently wafted back down to the bottom by the water current.  Cool! Over the next few weeks I saw their numbers increase, and thought to myself "Well good!  That's a nice, robust colony of trumpet snails, and they must be doing a great job at processing fish waste!"
 
Then they reached some sort of critical mass, and by critical mass I mean of nuclear proportions.  It seemed like all of a sudden a hydrogen snail bomb had gone off in my tank, and at night I could easily count hundreds of them all over the place.  Easily.  They were dotting the substrate like the face of a heavily freckled ginger-man.  They were all over the driftwood.  There were wavy lines of these SOB's running all the way up from the bottom of the tank glass to the top, almost like a shoreline, and the waves just kept coming.  I watched in horror as this epidemic unfolded in my precious little aquatic world.  
 
SOLUTION: Send in the Clowns!  A roving wolf-pack of Clown Loaches, Great Bane of the dreaded Trumpet Snail!  I've had the Clowns for only about a week now and I already see a *major* reduction in Trumpet Snail population density.  Thank Heaven for fish forums, where I learned about this!
 
I wouldve included pictures but this all already happened and the photos i did have are on my old phone, which I lost.  But that's another story and it involves Golden Monkeys, so I'm not going there right now.  So here's an attempted pic of 3 out of the 4 clowns i have.  I brought 5 home originally, but I lost one in a horrible accident during acclimation.  More on that in my next post....

that last post made me chuckle    - glad your population of mts is under control now

Alright, this post is not humorous at all, it's really a warning/confession.  My own carelessness has resulted in the deaths and suffering of a few fish, and I post this with more than a little shame.  But I do this because theres's someone out there somewhere who might read this and save a life.
 
1) Healthy Kuhli Loaches can slip through and around obstructions far better than you might think. I had the kuhlis i got from a LFS in a larger container with a mixture of the water they came in and my own tank water.  I had acclimated them to my own tank water through a dripline, with patience and care.  After doing so I thought I would just pour off most of the water mixture into a sink, and then gently pour the kuhlis into my tank.  While pouring off the water one of them actually jumped around my fingers, through air, to the pour-off stream in the sink, and down he went. Don't underestimate your fish.  They can jump out of water.
 
2) Watch out for jumpers. Once again i had a dripline going, this time into a cooler, for 5 Clown Loaches that i picked up to balance out my trumpet snail surprise.  Let me tell you I really did this carefully, the whole dripline procedure took over 4 hours.  I gently poured the fish with their bagged water into a small cooler, ran a dripline that took 2 hours to fill it up the rest of the way, dumped out 3/4 of it, and then dripped again for another 2 hours.  The waterline had gone almost to the top of the cooler again.  When I finally went to release them into their new home, I noticed only 4, and found one looking all fragged up on the carpet.  It was hard for me to see that, a near dead and gasping fish on the carpet for i don't know how long, because I wasn't paying attention. My own fault.  He died 2 days after I put him into the tank.
 
3) Be prepared if you're going to buy fish from a local hobbyist/breeder. This one at least has a happy ending, even though i did it totally wrong and caused trauma and suffering to the most magnificent fish in my aquarium. I went looking for a discus hobbyist/breeder, not a store but someone who happens to care for and to raise them at home.  I found somebody online 45 minutes away. I brought that damned little cooler i used with the clown loaches thinking it was fine. I should've brought something better.  I had a 45-minute bumpy ride in my Jeep the whole time home, and the water was just sloshing around, battering the poor thing for 45 minutes, and when i got home, I found him near death, barely even gasping anymore, and he was in about 2 inches of water.  The rest had splashed out through unseen gaps in the sliding top.  I can't even believe he survived.  A 5.5" Marlboro Red that I basically stuck in a cooler and shook around for 45 minutes until there was almost no water left. So just think about your transport plan if you pick somethiing up from a private seller, please.

Aw This most definitely has been a bumpy road for you! Is that the last part of the story or is there more?

Hiya Ninja, No this isnt the end   I have more to write about.  Just not tonite.  When I next post I'm gonna talk about what happened to my plants, or rather the lack thereof..

ericNH said:

Hiya Ninja, No this isnt the end

  I have more to write about.  Just not tonite.  When I next post I'm gonna talk about what happened to my plants, or rather the lack thereof..

Click to expand...

Ooh okay C: I was just curious as the others were sort of cliffhangers and this one wasn't really.
 
Looking forward to the next post!

I Totally Blew It with the Plants
 
So now that I have an established tank with some healthy and happy fish, I am wishing I had another tank to start all over again since my plants are pathetic.  In getting this far I put my fish through more stress than they should've been subjected too, and I don't want to disturb anything for a month or more.  I'm just doing 25% tank changes every 3 days and feeding the fish, and that's it.  If I were to try and plant this thing properly I would need a new place to start because I have nowhere to put my fish. I wish I had a 55gal instead of this 125g behemoth.  How on Earth am I going to fix this now?
 
Anyway what I really wanted to build was a Wasltad-type tank, but I didn't know it at the time.

• I do NOT want to dose with ferts  or trace elements more than a couple of times per year.
• I do NOT want to start with the CO2 contraptions and/or CO2 doses.  I've got enough stuff hoooked up already.  Two filters, two heaters, two airpumps, two airstones, and two powerheads.  And a UV sterilizer is in the pipeline.  Enough already!
• I do NOT want to keep my lighting restricted to 6-8 hours a day.  I want 10-12 hours of lighting, or even more if I can get away with it.  I love hanging out with my fish, and when I'm here I want to see them.
• I do NOT want algae.

Now I know some of you out there are thinking "ok mr. ericNH, and how about a magical unicorn fish that will go around leaving rainbow trails and miniature pots of gold to go with your completely realistic set of goals there?"  But it can be done.  The Walstad Method!  Look it up if you're not already familiar.  So that's where I want my tank to go, but I can't seem to get around the logistics of holding my fish while I totally re-do my way-too-large tank.  I have some wacky idea that involves getting a job at the lfs and getting access to dirt-cheap equipment for a second set-up, but I'm gonna percolate my thoughts on this for a while and see what other solutions may bubble up.
 
Lastly, here are some pics that I hope will at least make you chuckle at how pathetically anemic my plants are, and they should also make y'all out there feel better about your own tanks, which are far more beautiful than mine atm.