kiwibrick

I'm sure that shub is a delightful colour too!, I have one sitting under the deck waiting to be turned into a small pond, it's a nice purple/maroon colour...

Damn thats a nice tank!

If you used a piano type hinge full height of the long doors it would probably eliminate any sagging.

Very interested to watch this for ideas as I will be building a very similar size tank with sump some time soon in a wall in my basement

This has motivated me do a small project on my 55g tank, I think a hydroponic box to replace the lid of the trickle filter on top of the tank planted with pothos/peace lily/orchids of some sort will be pleasing to the eye! And also slightly reduce my water changes, which helps when you are on tank water.

I used the heat only method when I had clown loaches, it worked perfectly, just have to watch for stress and increase the surface agitation to keep the oxygen level up.

There is no problem drilling a hole in a concrete base wall, just need a hammer drill and a drill bit,

Ah ok. My tank (220L) stays around 7.0 and I have a reasonable sized piece of driftwood in there too.

I'm on tank water as well, but mine comes out of the tap at 7. I have a bag of oyster shells in my filter because of the non-existant hardness, and I also dose my tank with Seachem Equilibrium every water change. I had my tank running well in the previous house we were in on town water, and after moving to this house I was getting regular random deaths with no apparent cause, after much hair pulling and research I found the lack of trace minerals in the rainwater could be the culprit, so I started adding the Equilibrium and the random deaths have stopped 8) With the ph coming out of the tap so low in your case I would be worried about any copper pipes that were in the house too! water tank might need a clean out to sort the ph, I've heard of people putting a concrete block in their water tanks to try and harden the water slightly too.

I don't know about the bulbs, but the drivers in the kits are 110 & 240V

Could try these http://www.rapidled.com/servlet/the-141/%28New%29-7-LED-PAR38/Detail or these http://www.rapidled.com/servlet/the-DIY-Retrofit-Kits-cln-Dimmable-Kits/Categories

Was browsing hack-a-day and found this cool hack to auto dose plant ferts in a tank, thought someone here might find it useful/interesting http://hackaday.com/2011/01/21/fertiliz ... more-33241

I have 10 of these in my community tank, and yes they are a nice lively addition to the tank with some good colour, they definitely have that piranha look head on. They do feed relatively aggressively darting around for flakes, but they go absolutely mental for bloodworm. I keep mine with 2 large Angel fish, some Honey Gouramis and some lemon tetras, all seem to get on well, I did just recently add a Redfinned shark and he was quite upset with the Columbians for a day or so constantly chasing them but he has given up now. One downer is they get some sort of unknown disease, they can get (and some of mine have) what looks like black pigment in a large spot/spots on them, it doesn't cause any sort of change in texture of the scales just black blotches, none of mine have died from it yet but from what I have been able to find out on the net sometimes they die and sometimes they don't (with or without the black marks going away), and it supposedly isn't contagious. Bit of a shame it spoils their colouring a bit though.

Check your water hardness. I believe guppies like water on the med-hard side so if they died off I suspect your water might be quite soft.

Those look pretty young, how long have you had them and how big were they when you got them? Have they always done the sitting on the bottom thing? Their behavior looks similar to when I had 70 or 80 fry, a percentage of the fry didn't develop properly and would spend the majority of their time swimming along scrapping the gravel, and they would also sleep/rest on their sides on the gravel at night, needless to say those ones got culled.