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.