That hoplo is beautiful.
Been there with the tank swaps. Upgrading a 30g to a 55g ended up taking about eight hours and multiple visits to a hardware store. And as you know, lugging a tank that size up a flight of stairs sucks. The 55g was a Fluval Roma, also an ex-marine tank, with the inbuilt filter intake and outtake, but our Gumtree special was missing some critical washers key to making it not leak, which we discovered after several hours of cleaning salt out of the thing. LFS didn't have them, but B&Q did. It took &^&* ages to put the thing together. Had to drive back to B&Q for some reason but can't even recall why. It probably involved washers. Filled it up partway with our newly aquired Python (I think I would have broken down in tears without that) and found out that it didn't leak. Good. Emptied it with the Python. I decide I'm going to kiss whoever invented the Python.
Then the fun began (because comparing washers in B&Q wasn't) -- chasing all our fish and putting them into buckets, which did not impress them at all, and shifting the 30g out of the space and wiggling the 55g in. I was convinced that I wasn't strong enough to assist OH, and had some male climbery-type friends on call to help, but somehow, he and I (mostly him) shuffled it into place. You want to make a stand for feminism, but a 240L tank on a cabinet is still a 240L tank on a cabinet. Then we shifted the substrate from the 30g to the 55g. A mix of gravel and black sand, and when weeks later I found corys without barbels, I felt pretty stupid for not taking the opportunity to change the entire bloody thing to sand (had been hoping the corys would not cory on the gravel when half the tank was sand -- it turns out, this doesn't work). Anyway, returned the logs and slate, then attempted to recapture unhappy fish in buckets and reintroduce them to their new home. The raphael catfish got its spines entangled in a plant we'd thrown in its bucket. Gently detached traumatized catfish from plant. Bristlenose pleco swam in frantic circles around the edge of the bucket. This is a geometry problem. Square net always means there's a gap for the pleco to escape. I don't know how I caught her. Easiest fish in the world to catch? The Bolivian ram. It sits there gormlessly while you scoop it up in a net. Then drank a bottle of wine and decided we were never moving that damned tank again.
Been there with the tank swaps. Upgrading a 30g to a 55g ended up taking about eight hours and multiple visits to a hardware store. And as you know, lugging a tank that size up a flight of stairs sucks. The 55g was a Fluval Roma, also an ex-marine tank, with the inbuilt filter intake and outtake, but our Gumtree special was missing some critical washers key to making it not leak, which we discovered after several hours of cleaning salt out of the thing. LFS didn't have them, but B&Q did. It took &^&* ages to put the thing together. Had to drive back to B&Q for some reason but can't even recall why. It probably involved washers. Filled it up partway with our newly aquired Python (I think I would have broken down in tears without that) and found out that it didn't leak. Good. Emptied it with the Python. I decide I'm going to kiss whoever invented the Python.
Then the fun began (because comparing washers in B&Q wasn't) -- chasing all our fish and putting them into buckets, which did not impress them at all, and shifting the 30g out of the space and wiggling the 55g in. I was convinced that I wasn't strong enough to assist OH, and had some male climbery-type friends on call to help, but somehow, he and I (mostly him) shuffled it into place. You want to make a stand for feminism, but a 240L tank on a cabinet is still a 240L tank on a cabinet. Then we shifted the substrate from the 30g to the 55g. A mix of gravel and black sand, and when weeks later I found corys without barbels, I felt pretty stupid for not taking the opportunity to change the entire bloody thing to sand (had been hoping the corys would not cory on the gravel when half the tank was sand -- it turns out, this doesn't work). Anyway, returned the logs and slate, then attempted to recapture unhappy fish in buckets and reintroduce them to their new home. The raphael catfish got its spines entangled in a plant we'd thrown in its bucket. Gently detached traumatized catfish from plant. Bristlenose pleco swam in frantic circles around the edge of the bucket. This is a geometry problem. Square net always means there's a gap for the pleco to escape. I don't know how I caught her. Easiest fish in the world to catch? The Bolivian ram. It sits there gormlessly while you scoop it up in a net. Then drank a bottle of wine and decided we were never moving that damned tank again.
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