Phew !!

Well a big thankyou to the guys at Seaview and Briggsy for your recommendation. After mass planting out our tank, putting new life-glo tubes in and 5 siamese algae eaters, our tank has been restored.

we only had a few blades of Glosso left, luckily it is on its way back !

Ahhhh Algae...

After installing the new light 8x39 watts we seem to have upset the balance...

Becuase now we have a major Algae problem.



Seaview recommended we reduce the amount of light and get lower Kelin tubes. Im pretty sure the ones that come with the light are 20,000K so we will look at getting some 5,000 to 10,000K tubes. (apparentky 20,000K are better suited to Marine...whoops!)

Eheim is in... well sort of

After having some issues with water clarity, we have decided to upgrade the built in AR980 filter to an external Eheim canister filter... that... and we want to get a metal halide light which won't fit with the old trickle filter..


As you can see we havn't fitted the Ehiem properly yet... just waiting for the good bacteria to be transfered to the new filter. Give it a week or two.

We have also read that Trickle filters introduce lots of oxygen into the water, which is fine, however in teh process it also gets rid of a lot of co2.

Updated Photos

Well here it is, our AquaOne 980 as it now stands.

btw there are Discus in there somewhere... they are still getting use to their new environment. a little different from the 55lt Bucket!

Stage 10 - Lighting

Now that the CO2 was cranking and the plants were taking off (except the ***) we decided to upgrade our fluro tubes. Not really sure this helped because now the tank looks darker.

This is becuase there are three Fluro tubes in the AquaOne light hood. 2 x 30w and 1 x 25w T8 fluro. And since you cant get a shorter pink 25w fulro, we had to get a 30w pink tube, a 25w PowerGlow and a 30w PowerGlow white.

Now that we have"been there, done that" we wouldn't buy the AquaOne 980. Simply because for a planted aquarium the lights are not adequate. Our fine leafed plants **** are browning off a couple of inches from the top.

We are now looking at getting the AquaOne MG1000 Metal Halide light.... problem with this is it won't fit with the built in Trickle filter... so we will need to buy a new canister filter too... proberbly get the Eheim 2028 so we can use it with our next tank..

Stage 9 - Glosso

After 3 weeks of waiting we decided to order some more Glosso from Boronia Aquarium Melbourne Australia. Ordered it Sunday, They shipped it Monday, had it 11am Tuesday was in the tank Tuesday night !

I highly recommend these guys, very speedy service. We paid $10 for a large punnet (100+ plants) + $10 postage. Our local place wanted $6 per pot 3 shoots per pot!

Because we had already put the fish in, we bought some stainless steel planting tweezers to plant the glosso. It took hours to plant all of the plants. I highly recommend planting glosso with only a small amount of water in the tank. 8-10 cm max... not a full 215 Litres..

Stage 8 - CO2

After an unfortuanate experience with our DIY CO2 system (drained the entire tank when a air line tube came out) we decided to look into a pressured CO2 system.

We investigated the options here, a cheaper system from Red Sea vs the Dupla and after a couple of quotes we discovered that for a complete CO2 system with ph / co2 controller was going to set us back about $1500 !!

So we checked out systems on eBay. They were cheaper online but still quite pricy. Then we discovered CO2 systems available on ebay.co.uk. Fortunantly I was heading over to Europe in 2 weeks so I pre ordered a complete system from Germany.

• 2 kg CO2 Cylinder
• Propper CO2 tubing
• Magnetic Soleniod
• Glass Reactor/Ceramic Diffuser
• 2 Guage Regulator
• Needle Valve
• One way backflow valve.

all for AU$240 delivered to the UK...

When I got to the UK my cylinder had arrived, a little battered but ok... then I discovered that they had shipped it full. So after emptying 2kg of CO2 into my friends green house, My friend packed it away ready for the trip home to Aust.


The next challenge would be bringing it back. Before we purchased the Cylinder we contacted Qantas and they said it will be fine, provding the cylinder was empty and we could show them the valve was open.

I got to Heathrow early, went to the BA desk, unpacked my cylinder and showed the checkin staff. Luckily I had prior permission, otherwise there was no way I would have managed to get it home. Everything was ok and the cylinder made it back in one peice. On the way home from the air port we poped into our local pet shop and had it filled $19.95 :)


We also picked up a PH/CO2 controller from eBay. It was a simple one that we plug into our Magnetic Solenoid. Works a treat for $110 delivered, not quite the $700 we got quoted in Aust.

Essentially it all connects up something like this...

Stage 7 - Fill her up

Now that most of the plants were in (and at this stage our Glosso hadn't arrived) We filled the tank up to almost the top with water. Again we used the Takashi plate method to add the water.

Once the tank was full, we skimmed all the floating plant bits out, and reconnected up the filter and heater.
We ran the tank without any fish for a week and then added 10 neons to start the Bio process again. Since we used our Filter on the Disucs holding tank, it still had all the good Biological matter in it So this helped get things rolling.

In the mean time our Discus holding tank was being filtered by our Aqua One mini filiter.

Stage 6 - Planting Time

Following is a list of plants we used..

1. Glossostigma E.
2. Java Moss
3. Amazon Sword
4. ...
5. ...

The first thing we did was tie our Java Moss onto the Dift wood. It would have been easier with no water in the tank, but we were getting fungus growing on our driftwood. We tied on the Java moss with some green cotton.

Once the moss was in place, we planted the Foreground plants first, then planted the larger ones at the back. We placed the *** evenly around the front on the drift wood, to help break up the brown of the driftwood.

Stage 5 - Time to add some water

Now that the Gravel and Drift wood is in the tank, its time to add a little water. Don't add all the water, about 10cm - enough to cover the gravel and a bit more.

Takashi recommends placing a plate upside down on the bottom of the tank and slowly pour water in over the plate. This helps to keep the gravel nice and smooth. Time to plant some plants !

Stage 4 - Driftwood

Once the gravel was all set up it was time to begin decoration of the tank. Again we read up on what Takashi Amano had to say on the matter and set up our driftwood in a triangle-type shape with the apex slightly off centre.

We had previously bought 4 pieces of driftwood and had them soaking for 8 weeks (the recommendation is at least 4 weeks to allow the natural tannis to soak out - water change every week).

you may notice that the back left hand corner of the tank slopes down. This is another recommendation from Takashi as all the waste from the tank should pool here which will make for easy cleaning.

This picture clearly shows the gravel sloping from front to back with driftwood placed on top. It is also especially important to get the gravel at the front of the tank perfectly straight as this will influence how you view the planted aquarium.

Stage 3 - Substrate Fertiliser

There are various ways you can add fertiliser to the substrate and it is well worth doing so as it will greatly aid the growth of the plants....hopefully!

There are a few options out there and these are the ones we came across.

• RedSea do a pre-mixed gravel in bags. You use this on the bottom layer and then add a decorative gravel on top or you can use their gravel for the whole thing. - This sounds good and an easy way to do things but each bag of gravel costs around $70 and we needed about 3 bags...
  
  
• Dupla do a gravel as well but you have to add the fertiliser to it. The fertiliser is a red clay laterite. You can just buy this laterite and add it to your own gravel. - This is what we ended up doing as it cost $40 and then we could add it to the gravel of our choice

The gravel that we chose was a 2-3mm black granite non-polished. It is best to chose a small grade gravel for the planted aquarium as the plant roots like a fine substrate. Be careful using very fine substrate as they can become anaerobic.

To begin with we washed the black granite gravel thoroughly. This took quite a while as it was very dusty as we had 50 kg to wash. We filled half a bucket with the gravel and filled with water and swished around and drained and repeated about 10-15 times for each bucket.

To add the Dupla fertiliser you take about 1/3 of the gravel and mix in the fertiliser. Use gloves as it is bright red and will stain.

Now add the fertilised substrate to the gravel around the heating cable. We added some gravel

in first to make sure that the cables were not touching. Not sure if this was essential to do or not.

We then added the remaining 2/3 of the gravel on top of the gravel with the fertiliser. We took Takashi Amano's advice and and sloped the gravel from the front of the tank to the back. So that it ended up being about 5 cm thick at the front and 9-10cm thick at the back of the tank. According to Takashi this forces perspective and will make for a more beautiful planted tank.

You can clearly see the layer of gravel with fertiliser. this should become less obvious as the plants begin to grow.

Stage 2 - under-gravel heating

We researched under-gravel heating and found that it was essential for a planted aquarium as it:

(i) raised the temperature of the gravel around the plant roots by a few degrees which aids in their growth

(ii) the temperature difference between this layer of gravel and the water in the tank sets up a convection current which aids in the cycling of nutrients

so we looked in to prices. These varied from about $90 - $500 depending on the brand and the size and wattage. We managed to pick up a 100W Rena cal system for $20 on ebay.

Unfortunately it didn't come with suction caps and we had trouble finding the right size. In the end we used air-line suction caps that are split to allow for multi-size tubing. This was fine but would have been better to have closed suction caps.

To lay the under-gravel heating dry out the bottom on the tank completely (this allows the suction caps to actually stick rather than sliding around) and lay out the cable in a back and forward pattern.

You can use suction caps to stick the cable to the back of the tank as well.

Stage 1 - relocate the discus

We chose to start the new tank fresh as we had major phosphate problems in the old tank. Apparently when your phosphorus levels are way off the chart then it is probably all bound up in your gravel. This is why we bought new gravel and we wanted a new look for the tank.

But first we had to move the discus out. So we drained the tank to about 15cm then caught the fish and moved them to a small 50L storage container on wheels. We also moved some of their gravel and the half dead plants so they would have somewhere to hide.

We bough a new tiny filter for this tank, because the discus will probably be there for a few weeks yet. It was reccommended to us that we put the AR-980 filter on top of this make shift tank so that the bacteria from this filter can set up in the new tiny filter. The AR980 filter was too long for the storage container so we bought a lenth of thick tubing from the aquarium shop and re-routed the output of the filter in to the storage container.

The older filter is slightly larger than the new filter....

We will leave the old filter on for about 1 week then the discus should be fine with the little filter (the discus spa) with regular water changes for a few weeks no problem.

Welcome to my Discus

We recently became interested in discus because they looked amazing in aquarium shops. So we bought four them and put them in our new tank:the AR980. We then started researching about discus and discovered that they were apparently very high maintenance fish! HOwever, so far we have found them to be quite hardy and great pets.


We wanted to create a planted discus tank and this is what our first attempt looked like...

It looked ok for a while but the plants slowly began to die (and were being eaten by 3 Platys that we had in the tank with the discus). So we began to research about the needs of underwater plants. We spoke to many aquarium shop staff and received varied advice we searched the web and were inspired by the work of Takashi Amano (www.aquariumdesigngroup.com).
We are now beginning take 2 of our planted discus aquarium and have included what we have done to help out anyone who wants to give it a go as well.