75 gallon planted aquarium

Are you going to enter it into the Aquatic Gardener's Association aquascaping contest next year? That would give it enough time to settle down and for you to trim it a bit to show your skill. It would be nice to see some native fish in that contest instead of the same neon tetras that are in every single tank there.

Link: http://showcase.aqua...10/index0c.html

I'd figure out what works with what I give it, and need to do to maintain the overall aesthetic, and go with that I'm kind of an a-hole that way to my organisms lol. But once I determine that the organism doesn't work with the constraints I give it, I don't bother them any more either.

That said, a temporary drop to 6 isn't the end of the world. You could also get some carbonate sand (like the cichlid sand) and incorporate it into your sandbed, or make bags of it that you hide in the back behind the plants. When I had my shop, I inherited a bunch of dead coral heads and put them in my sump of the system to build a stronger buffer capacity. It worked really well.

Cichlid sand, I hadn't thought of that, but that is a great idea. I'll be ordering some of that.

How well does the cistern work for you? You can get a decent 3 stage RO filter for $100. I'm going to look into single cartridge solutions too, that can get you down in price and maybe not take out the carbonate. This is how I filter my water if I'm not trying to soften it too much, but I don't have horrible phosphate from the tap. I'm using a lead and arsenic filter now, I can't remember if that resin will pull phosphorus too. Not seeing anything immediately apparent online either (what a google mess!).

The cistern works well as long as there is enough rain to keep it full. It's our primary water source for the house. We use it for everything except drinking. I think I could learn to live with almost any kind of water so long as it was consistent and I knew what to do with it to make it work. Here in southeast Ohio we've had a rather rainy year so this early November was the first time this year I've had to haul water from an outside source. Last year was rather dry and I hauled most of the water we used. I didn't have any planted aquariums with lights last year so I didn't see any serious problems with algae. I've always been concerned with the excess water usage of a RO system. Using the cistern, we've kind of got into a 'conserve water' groove that's hard to break. We've actually got a water softener that we stopped using because we had too many instances where it would regenerate when the cistern was low and end up emptying it out. Then the pump has to be primed again. Thinking of it, I'm not sure if the water softener would remove Phosphorus. I may have to check. I could certainly use it when I doing water changes and then shut it down again.

Simplify... This sounds like a hassle, and it should be fun

Todd

I love it. It's all good. There's nowhere that it says that a hassle can't also be fun. I'll be ordering some phosphorus remover and cichlid sand tonight. Once it gets here, I'm grabbing the peroxide and kicking some cyanobutteria!

Thank you much for the help.
Steve.

Th combination of the depth of field and the angled stream bed and your photo selection makes the tank look even larger... I rather like the aesthetic.

Thank you Michael. I tried a number of settings for these pic.s, but in the end I kind of liked the ones where I focused on the foreground and left the subject softly out of focus. The one thing I didn't try though was stopping the aperture down to try to give the appearance of a deeper plane of focus. I thought about it, but then forgot to do it. I didn't figure it would have worked anyway as the super slow shutter speed needed to compensate would cause everything but the rocks to be a complete blur. I may try that anyway when the tank cleans up enough to get some more shots of it. Thanks again.

Steve.

Are you going to enter it into the Aquatic Gardener's Association aquascaping contest next year? That would give it enough time to settle down and for you to trim it a bit to show your skill. It would be nice to see some native fish in that contest instead of the same neon tetras that are in every single tank there.

Link: http://showcase.aqua...10/index0c.html

You're much too kind Erica. I have a hard time seeing how mine could compete with some of the incredibly beautiful tanks I've seen pictures of. This may be somewhat due to the fact that I designed it more for the fish than the viewer. That being said, the 5 bigeye chubs in there have been in other tanks before and they seem to prefer this one, so I guess it's already won with them...............and that's important, because like Michael Wolfe says, "minnows are people too"!

Thanks again.
Steve.

Just an update. I didn't end up using the peroxide. I just added some PHOS-ZORB to the filter and vacuumed up all the cyanobacteria I could find. There's now very little sign of it left and I remove a small patch of it once every week or two, but it's quite manageable. The hair algae seemed to increase after this, but no more than I've seen it in my other two planted tanks. The planted tank I set up in late September now has very little algae at all so I'm assuming this one will go that way also. Some of the plant growth definitely slowed after adding the PHOS-ZORB, but there's still enough to take care of the fish load which is still slowly increasing. I'm thinking the increase in hair algae may actually be from the slower growth of the plants. Thanks again for all the help.

Steve.

Edited by frogwhacker, 24 December 2011 - 05:12 PM.