Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Fishtank Update

Aquarium Update:
Every one of my friends (whether I interact with him/her on a very regular basis or irregular) have asked me over the past few months about the fishtank.  And their intent was to genuinely know about it, not just general chit-chat.  Most know about experiments in my life more through my blog than they speak to me (yes, I know that is sad, but not as much as nobody caring at all!). Lack of updates in posts here had got them concerned, I suspect.
So I thought I owe an update on my fishtanks to all you friends who regularly skim through here (irrespective of what draws you here: genuine curiosity, boredom, ample free time to kill or sheer friendship!). .
Thanks for asking, they are doing good!  ~~~touchwood~~~

There are a few enhancements I was wanting to do over this summer on my tank (mainly: upgrading to a better dirt and rearranging the plants), but I couldn't spare enough time.  The tank looks good, but I wanted to take it a notch higher. Guess it will have to wait for a while now  ~~~sigh~~~
I up'ed this video a while ago, but never got around posting it here (what a lazy a$$)!  
So here you go, my 30G (110 liters) fresh water planted aquarium.  I have shot the video of my smaller (10G) tank too, but haven't gotten around uploading it yet.  It had grown a beautiful carpet of Pearl Weed. Which I took down last week as it had a lot of Java Moss intertwined in it, which had started poaching on my pearl weed.  So I cleaned most of the surface and replanted them. Waiting to see how that goes.

Freshwater Planted Aquarium:


Some tips I have come to believe will help budding aquarium enthusiasts.

  1. Regular water change
  2. I underestimated the importance of this for a long time and did water changes only once in 2 or 3 weeks without much consistency. Now I have moved to a strict once-a-week 20% water change policy. And about 50% once in 4 weeks. With every water change, I add a few drops of liquid fertilizer (API Leaf Zone). I have noticed marked difference. Advantage: Lesser fluctuation in water quality, meaning much stabler chemistry, which all-in-all brings in a lot of goodness within it: healthier fishes & lush green plants being but a few.
  3. Lighting
  4. I wanted to move to a fancier T5HO lighting, but it costs a bomb (I have an expensive 65W CoralLife AquaLight that I got on a discount but it is just too powerful for my tank, I started getting a lot of algae), so I just switched out my aging CFL and put in a new cheap 15W CFL (Phillips, 5100K), which I keep on for about 8 hrs a day. And results were quite satisfactory. I might, now on, keep replacing my CFL every year till the time I can afford fancier lighting. There are talks in the community that effectiveness (notably wavelength and Kelvin temperature) degrades with age of the tube (unlike natural sunlight). Haven't spent too much time validating the claims, but I think it might be true and won't hurt my pocket too much to follow it.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed the video.

No comments: