65 gallon rebuild

[Lalo J.]

Hello guys, almost a month ago I uninstalled my 65 gallon tank, it's completely empty, the reason is that I'm going to start from scratch, it was necessary to regain energy and motivation, several fish have gone, my beautiful penguin tetras now live in a 220 gallon tank with 12 discus fish, a school of more than 30 rummy nose tetra and other fish. I still have no idea of the aquascape in my rebuild in this tank, but I'm going to say goodbye to sand, plus I'll try low requirement plants again. Here I cannot get what you call "root tabs", so I'm thinking of placing the mineralized substrate that I prepared a while ago, and on top of fine gravel, do you think I should place some layer of something else between these two elements? I will also use Seachem Flourish as the main additive, the only plants I have in mind are Cryptocorines, maybe anubias as well, some low requirement plant ideas would be appreciated.
I'm going to put a back sump to improve filtration, that may have been the point where it failed to keep cichlids in the tank, they all died, some lasted longer than others, Apistogramma borelli lasted only a few days, and Apistogramma trifasciata was with me for a few months. Any design ideas from back sump folks?
This tank is still in a planning process, any ideas are welcome.

 

[NoahLikesFish]

Pogostemon octopus water lily vals bacopas pothos floating water lettuce hornwort sag flourish doesn’t work well ime nilocg thrive is the best unless you can diy, honestly all obligate aquatic plants are very easy to keep because they don’t need/ are adapted to low CO2. Borellei are cold water species and if you keep Them in a mature setup that’s a bit colder they Will thrive

 

[Sprinkle]

if you can, id add some potting mix underneath your gravel. it will be better for your plants. and it will work better with gravel than sand, in my tank LOL

i decided to shuffle everything do got this instead from putting all my amazon swords together ha

 

[NoahLikesFish]

Don’t be an idiot and use potting soil it only works on very small setups and it will float in water

 

[NoahLikesFish]

Don’t be an idiot and use potting soil it only works on very small setups and it will float in water

I only have one dirt tank which is a 10 gallon and I only use dirt because I have root feeder plants and I made a diy gravel layer under the dirt so I don’t crash my tank

 

[Lalo J.]

if you can, id add some potting mix underneath your gravel. it will be better for your plants. and it will work better with gravel than sand, in my tank LOL

i decided to shuffle everything do got this instead from putting all my amazon swords together ha

View attachment 229740

I'm thinking of placing the MTS, it's potting soil but mineralized, I used it in the riparium and in general it worked well, it's almost what you are suggesting, but it's possible that it gets mixed with time and that the soil appears in the water, it was dougall who warned me of that, also my big angels sometimes dig into the substrate and the gravel that I'm going to use is fine, I need some suggestion of something to put between the earth and the gravel and prevent them from mixing.

 

[Sprinkle]

i know. bad stuff happened to me today.. well dougall is happy id use gravel if i were you.

 

[NoahLikesFish]

I'm thinking of placing the MTS, it's potting soil but mineralized, I used it in the riparium and in general it worked well, it's almost what you are suggesting, but it's possible that it gets mixed with time and that the soil appears in the water, it was dougall who warned me of that, also my big angels sometimes dig into the substrate and the gravel that I'm going to use is fine, I need some suggestion of something to put between the earth and the gravel and prevent them from mixing.

Mineral substrate works wonders

 

[CichlidFins]

Hi Lalo, long time no see. Sorry to hear about the failure of the previous version of this tank but excited to hear for the new progress on the startup.

 

[Lalo J.]

Hi Lalo, long time no see. Sorry to hear about the failure of the previous version of this tank but excited to hear for the new progress on the startup.

Hi Jay, good to see you around here again, you've been away for a while. Well, the main thing is to improve the filtration that is why I'm going to place the back sump, I would not call the previous process a failure, but if the fact that I could not maintain plants or dwarf cyclids in the long term, I love these fish that is why improve the water quality is important here.