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A Wellingtonian goes Native


Native_Tanks

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Hello everyone, my name is Brent

First a little about myself;

I'm a 45 M living in Mt Victoria Wellington, working at Tranz Metro driving passenger trains, My first love is travel and have so far been to around 50 country's mostly developing countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Caribbean and also Antarctica.

Now the fish;

I started about 2 years ago when I purchased lock stock and barrel a 700 x 500 x 450 (140lt) tank, canister filter, equipment and fish on Trade Me which I located at the end of my deck so I can get up close and personal.

A lot of mistakes and money later I have a very nice display tank which I was very happy with, that was until a friend suggested that we take a walk around the rock pools on the south coast of Wellington.

Long story short, after collecting some anemones, shrimp, fish, crabs, starfish, seaweed covered rocks and keeping them in a bucket then a cheep 20lt plastic tank I finally purchasing a 60lt tank with canister filter which now lives on the other side of my increasingly diminishing deck.

About 3 weeks ago I had this very strong smell coming from my FW tank and after some investigation and a long overdue water change I discovered 2 of my best fish floating on the surface covered in mould :cry: .

That's when I decided that the Native tank was far more active and interesting tank so the poor FW fish have to go!

I have been work towards changing my 140lt tank over to SW as soon as I work up the courage to list the FW fish on Trade Me (it will be sad to see them go).

One of the problems I have with the Native tank is keeping it cool! Initially it was not such a big problem as I was mainly collecting from high water rock pools which are use to warm temperatures but the deeper you go and the greater the variety of organisms the more important the temperature becomes.

The other day my new secondhand chillier arrived which I purchased from "Duke" :hail: who I would like to thank for all his patience and for answering my endless questions and for putting me on to this Society.(so now I've run out of excuses not to sell the FW fish)

Hopefully I can empty the poor suffering overloaded freezer of the water bottles that I have been using to keep the temperature down.

The plan for this up grade is to have a closed system. I don't have any room at this stage for a sump (the next up grade after this, if all go's well and I haven't declared bankruptcy, is to selling the couch and get a really BIG tank, stand and sump).

I going to try having the tank feeding into the Canister filter (internal propeller removed) then a 4800L/H external pump, chillier then back into the tank via a cheep wave maker.

I may have to change the pump and filter around if it will not pull enough water through.

Somewhere along the line I'll need to add a skimmer as well.

Finally;

One of the best parts of going Native is getting out and about collecting the different types of critters.

Ultimately, I want a Octopus 8) but that will have to be a bit further down the track.

That's enough ranting from me

Cheers

Brent

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