It has been a LONG time (like a year) since I have posted on this forum. I currently have a 45T with a 65 watt coralife pc fixture. The tank has a mish-mash of tahitian moon sand and plain old black gravel. I also have an RUGF running with two 100GPH powerheads.
I moved away from home for a while, leaving this tank in the care of my family, and it had fallen into bad disrepair. I lost all but three of my fish, and I don't think that they changed the water one time while I was gone.
Over the past month I have been cleaning the bejesus out of the tank, and I have it back to presentable conditions and water parameters now. I have it fairly heavily stocked with a selection of 6 various rainbows, one old fat and lazy SAE, a newly purchased clown pleco (a MUCH better algae eater than my SAE ever was), and a small bumblebee cat.
I am planning a low-budget makeover of the tank. I have always struggled to keep plants happy in this tank. It is a very deep tank which makes it difficult to grow most of the plants I buy in the store, because they are all so short, they cannot grow to reach the best light. This may also have something to do with my RUGF. The idea behind the RUGF was to dose the water with ferts and fourish excel, then the RUGF would keep nutrient-rich water flowing through the root structures of the plants. This idea sounded great in my head, but it has been less than effective in practice, plus it requires dosing a lot of ferts.
If I carefully remove the RUGF and replace the substrate with eco complete, I know it should be possible to grow at least some low light plants without having to stress every single day over dosing ferts and co2 systems. I want this to be as low maintainance as possible.
I have some concerns about this plan:
1. This tank has an emperor biowheel filter, will this be enough to keep the tank from cycling post-changeover?
2. Does eco-complete require a lot of pre-washing to keep it from clouding the water?
3. I could use some suggestions for hardy plants which will grow tall enough to "fill out" the background of the tank. Like I said above, everything I buy from the store winds up growing to about 5 inches then dies under my current setup, so something needs to change. It doesn't look too great having a 24" tall tank with 4 inches of plants in the bottom. I don't plan on using CO2, so I'm not expecting any sort of big-broad leafed plants to flourish, but anything that can grow to 18 inches without co2 would work.
Thanks in Advance!
I moved away from home for a while, leaving this tank in the care of my family, and it had fallen into bad disrepair. I lost all but three of my fish, and I don't think that they changed the water one time while I was gone.
Over the past month I have been cleaning the bejesus out of the tank, and I have it back to presentable conditions and water parameters now. I have it fairly heavily stocked with a selection of 6 various rainbows, one old fat and lazy SAE, a newly purchased clown pleco (a MUCH better algae eater than my SAE ever was), and a small bumblebee cat.
I am planning a low-budget makeover of the tank. I have always struggled to keep plants happy in this tank. It is a very deep tank which makes it difficult to grow most of the plants I buy in the store, because they are all so short, they cannot grow to reach the best light. This may also have something to do with my RUGF. The idea behind the RUGF was to dose the water with ferts and fourish excel, then the RUGF would keep nutrient-rich water flowing through the root structures of the plants. This idea sounded great in my head, but it has been less than effective in practice, plus it requires dosing a lot of ferts.
If I carefully remove the RUGF and replace the substrate with eco complete, I know it should be possible to grow at least some low light plants without having to stress every single day over dosing ferts and co2 systems. I want this to be as low maintainance as possible.
I have some concerns about this plan:
1. This tank has an emperor biowheel filter, will this be enough to keep the tank from cycling post-changeover?
2. Does eco-complete require a lot of pre-washing to keep it from clouding the water?
3. I could use some suggestions for hardy plants which will grow tall enough to "fill out" the background of the tank. Like I said above, everything I buy from the store winds up growing to about 5 inches then dies under my current setup, so something needs to change. It doesn't look too great having a 24" tall tank with 4 inches of plants in the bottom. I don't plan on using CO2, so I'm not expecting any sort of big-broad leafed plants to flourish, but anything that can grow to 18 inches without co2 would work.
Thanks in Advance!
