DiverJohn

***Warning*** Growing plants can become addictive :lol: I started replacing my plastic plants with real one about 3 months ago. The fish really love it! Quite cool to see my "relativly big" silver sharks carefully squeezing through the leaves. Where as before none of my fish would go near the plastic ones. Have found that going from plastic to live does involve a bit of patience. I have "Blue Hygro" and "Cambomba" (sp?) and there are a few others that grow really well. You need to wotch fertilizing when you start with the real plants. I think i went a bit overboard initially and had a mild case of algae. I stopped fertilizing for a couple of weeks and it sorted itself out. I have had good results with Florish excel. Next will come the questions about CO2, then lights...

Hey peoples Doing some painting inside my house this weekend. I will be using an enamel sealer/undercoat. Thats the real smelly one! Not acrylic. Now i am not painting the lounge where my tank is. The bedrooms are down the hall. I cant really see too many problems but enamels are smelly and i am getting out of the place over night, obviously cant take the fish tho! Any body had any experience? Even if its a case of "yep I did, no worries" it would put my mind at rest. Cheers

Hey Peoples , last week in another post Warren identified one of my plants as Rose Amazon Sword (Echinodorus osiris). I am not exactly sure but I dont think it is doing too well. When i bought the plants they looked health with nice long stems and good looking leaves. These died off after a couple of weeks so I pruned back quite hard and left them in to see what developed. Slowly leaves have developed, but they just dont look healthy. Black veins on the leaves... http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v626/DiverJohn/Sword001.jpg And then they seem to get holy and die off... http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v626/DiverJohn/Sword002.jpg These plants are quite low in a tank 500mm deep - 1.1x.5x.5 approx 250l. Lights are on 11 hours a day, 4x30W (3footers). DIY CO2, and a JBL 7 Balls close to each one. 5 ml of floursh exel evry 2nd day. Blue Hygro, Cambomba growing well, Japonise Rush growng "OK". pH 7, evrything else 0, gh 4. Any suggestions - could the Hygro and Cambomba be stripping the water of a trace element?

Please dont post the results!!! :lol: :lol: :lol: Kidding, would be interesting to see the answers

Hi Modern Angl, welcome I got into keeping fish about 10 months ago. I managed to get what turns out to be (i belive ) a very good deal. It was a 250ish litre tank with an eheim External filter. it was stocked with a reasonable amount of fish and was purchased off trademe. Caryls comment about bigger is better is, I belive, good advise. The only thing you cant buy is patience!!

HI Hummingbird, I got a couple of pieces of drift wood from a mate who used them for decoration in his Garden. I ended up giving up on the chilly bin method and went for the 60 litre rubbish bin method :lol: It took about 8 weeks to sink one piece and i put it in a small tank and no Tannins came out. The other bit was still floating when i checked it last week ( 10 weeks!) might be the wrong type of wood tho?? dunno? I wish i had a BIG pot to boil it in I guess I will have to be patient *sigh*....

I just use a cap of aquaplus per 15l. Straight from the tap, mix hot and cold till temp is about right, sometimes use a thermometer if the water change is a bit bigger than normal, then in she goes. No problems so far.

"Pinnicles" are great!! They make fantstic dive sites they have an abundance of wildlife. But i think you might be thinking of a "slightly" smaller scale than i am I am sure it would make a great looking tank!

Bizazre Ira? Mine works fine? And the lights are just on el- cheapo timers from bunnings.

Hey i did did some DIY wiring for a light fitting and sent a txt to a mate who does this kind of stuff for a living. I managed to get it completely wrong... hence his hastily txt'd reply "STOP!" Anyway didnt blow myself up. I would suggest the addition of a $15 RCD somewhere in your circutry, mines on the wall leading to the "power board" When its all wired up check your earth with amultimeter before you plug it in. Also when its all going... lightly touch the fitting with the BACK OF YOUR HAND. That way if you have accidently wired it up wrong when you get a "tingle" you wont grab the fitting as a reflex to the "tingle".

Hey serphew, thanks for that... When you say "leach out for a couple of months" do you mean "your tank will look really murky" is it the aquadic or the peat (both) causing that? As for months... can i buy some "right now" from some where :lol:

I do about a 30l (approx 15%) change every week. Which means with evaporation I usually add 35-40l . About once a month I only take out 15l (1 bucket full) and give all the parts in the filter a wash under the cold tap. Giving the coarse layers a good blast, and the finer layers just a bit of a rinse My "theory" is that so long as you dont kill ALL the bacteria by doing a major water change AND cleaning the filter at the same time. There is enough bacteria floating about & living in the gravel, to recolonize what ever you clean.

The only other product, not mentioned, i have in my box of "snake oils" is Aqua plus. Caryls method of not adding anything is also very valid IHMO. I am realitivly new to the hobby and aquired my tank second hand with an icecream container full of Ups, Downs etc. never touched them. Robs suggestion of a good test kit is very wise too. The one i use use does Ammonia, nitrite, ph (standard + high range) & hardness. I have added an Iron test kit now i have started adding real plants. Used to test things atleast once a week now "maybe" every 2 weeks. I would also recommend that every now and then you run your tests on your tap water - or what ever your using in your water changes. Its good to know your "baseline". I also keep a little notebook with the readings.

Balistic, forgot to ask. In pic #5 (and i think its in #4 too), at the right hand end of your tank you have a group of plants that look as tho the are on a single stem with a large leaf - what is it called?

Not sure on the name of #3 but i think its the same as something I bought about 2 months agoIt was sold as a sword and came with big long (10cm) stalks and a single leaf on the end of each stalk, It got really scummy, so i pruned it back quite hard only a couple of weeks after putting it in the tank I took a pic of what one of them looks like now, after 6 weeks... http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v626/DiverJohn/Fish_Dec04_004.jpg It was the black veins on the leaves of your plant, that I noticed first. And as you can see mine is similar. Is this black veiny look normal? If not does anybody know what causes it? How to fix it? Then again Ballistic I could be COMPLETLY wrong....

Cheers Pies! Wasnt sure but i suspected the flowrate of 30l per minute might have been a weeee bit high! And would be a big ask getting a needle valve to control it. Will keep an eye on trade me.

Looks nice! Is your lighting rig DIY? What kind of setup? T8, T5, MH?

BOC do a range of regulators for welding. ( check out thier website www.boc.co.nz then select, products > Gas Equipment » Regulators ) the cost is about 150 - 180 +gst. I know nothing about gas regulators... does anybody know if these are ok? obvious advantage is they will fit a bottle from BOC then its just the needle valve to get the fine controll cheers

If only i could have got into fish when we visited my Gran in Greymouth! I hope it stops! It looks quite nice, and got a couple of good looking cracks for sticking plants in. Cheers Caryl

Just purchased a piece of drift wood 2nd hand- nice big bit only 20 bucks! Anyway, was supposed to be wet, but was dry. So put it in a chilly bin of hot water. Sunk no problem but the water went yellow Must be still leaching tannins (?) Any tips on speeding up the process? Does hot water make any difference? Do you need to keep changing the water? Should i just throw it outside in the rubbish bin full of water and leave it for a couple of weeks? Oh and i dont have a pot THAT big!! :-?

Nice tank buzzy! Love the drift wood. I have got some soaking and cant wait to get it in.... I have Blue Hygro in my tank it grows really well, nice and tall. Cheap from LFS. When it grows to the surface i cut off a stem about three leave high, trim the bottom pair of leaves right back to about 5mm stalks. This makes an "anchor" and shove it in the gravel. Dunno if its the "right way" but it seems to work. I spent $10 on 5 bunches about 6 weeks ago, started planting another 2foot tank now...

Thanks Bill! the $54 I paid for the last sackful did seem a bit steep!!

In the process on setting up a small 2 footer for growing mainly plants with a school of something small (maybe 15 fish like harliquins) to add a bit of interest and create fertilizer. I have two buckets of of pebbles but they are quite large and predominantly light browns and white. I prefer a much darker substrate. Yesterday I was Mitre 10 and the guy gave me a handfull of "gap 7" paving substrate. When its wet this stuff looks fantastic - almost black! It is however quite "sharp" not nicely rounded like "proper " aquarium gravel. but at $5 (i think) for a BIG bag - 20 kilos? It surley worth considering. I left some in a basin overnight and the ph is slightly lower than the tap water i put in ( 7.8 from the tap, 7.2 now) GH is the same. comments or suggestions on this or other alternative substrates... For plants should I got even finer, sand? John.

Yes the plant is either Japonise Rush or Zealandia. I posted last week some comments re a "sword" that developed holes and went yellow after only a couple of weeks in the tank (photo3 on photobucket). When the plant looked really scummy i cut back the long stems and left a couple of leaves. As you can see from the pics the new leaves are coming on strong and do look to be developing nice colour and size.

Would you mind having a look at these pics and make some suggestions... http://photobucket.com/albums/v626/DiverJohn/ The grass / rush at the end is developing yellow tips? (Photo 2 & 4) Thanks...