My 125 L Tank

[Colonel Mustard]

HI all; This is a journal of my 125litre tank which should last about 4months (if i remember to up date it) i may also make a Blog of my process after the work has been completed.

Basically what I am going to do is turn an extremely lightly planted tank, a community aquarium, into a medium planted tank, an actual planted tank. I am new to planted tanks and this is going to be my first. I have done LOADS of research over the last 3 months practical fish keeping magazine has helped no end. In the mag Jeff and George really helped me, and without doubt others, by showing me great layouts and tips; so it is worth getting the sep issue of pfk.

Any-way I have made some mistakes, one I have no co2 and two I have 3wpg; mmm not a good combination. I have just been putting some plants from Java in the tank, it has taken a long time but I enjoyed it no end. To my surprise the plants were of a decent size which was unexpected for the price of £10.50 for 75 plants. They were well labelled and packed coming with foam and lead weights. There is not a lot of hard scape at the moment and i will be adding some rocks to the scape so it would be great if you could give me your opinion on this.

The tank is (as i mentioned above) 125lites a fluval 800deep from which I have removed the light hood and added a 4x24watt bulb hood. I am running the tank on a external 205 filter also from fluval. The substrate is nothing special at just gravel, but I like it. i will be getting pressurised co2 in about 3 months but for now i will soon be feeding seachmans excel

plants:
5 x Echinodorus Tennellus
5 x Hygrophilia Polysperma
5 x Red Ludwigia
5 x Ambulia Aquatica
5 x Bacopa Monniera
5 x Red Ivy
5 x Diplis Diandra
5 x Vallis Torta
5 x Elodea Densa
5 x Hairgrass
5 x Bacopa Caroliniana
5 x Pygmy Chain Sword
5 x Cabomba Aquatica
5 x Vallis Corkscrew sml
5 x Sagittaria Subulta

fish:
6 penguin tetra
5 glowlights
1 (unfortunately) neon
2 rainbow crossing
lots of platy fry
1oto (getting more soon)



View1

view 2

Filter, yes that is foam it was vibrating a bit so that reduces it, works great!!

front on

so it would be great to hear what you think and your advise thanks a lot

colonel

 

[Liam]

It looks like a very good start. You have some quite fast growers in there that and the excel should help control the algae, as your light is so high I would limit the photo period to eight hours until the plants get growing or even remove a light bulb until the tank has steady Co2. As you only have a gravel substrate you may want to consider doing water column dosing with dry ferts or something like tropica plus fert. If your water has lots of nitrate and phosphate like mine then with lots of water changes you may not need to dose ferts apart from micros. One other thing is that the java fern would do better not planted in the gravel but tied to the wood, if you want it on the gravel make sure the rhizome is above the gravel. You could also add some root tabs for the root feeders, or some plant substrate in frozen cubes a la Tom Barr.
All in all a very nice tank I think

 

[Themuleous]

Looking good, just needs to fill out a bit, but its a great start

Sam

 

[Biulu]

Nice tank! I especially like the lay-out around the bogwood.

 

[Themuleous]

Very nice