v-s.net v0.6

Tuesday, 2:09 pm in Life

“Hi there, I rent one of your apartments and I was wondering if we’re allowed to keep fish.”

“That should be fine, so long as they’re kept in a tank.”

“…”

And with that, I set about setting up my fishtank aquarium.  Today was ‘hardscaping’ day; putting in the gravel and non-living ornamentation, setting up the filter and the heater, and running initial water tests.

So here’s all the crap I’ve acquired for the first part of the project, all laid out helpfully on the dining room table.  We have:

• Generic 3mm gravel.
• Florapol substrate.
• Commercially bought driftwood.
• Fluval 50 watt heater.
• Aqua One 300L/hour hang-on filter.
• Generic water ager (it came with the tank).
• Fancy-schmancy Freshwater Master Test Kit (pH, ammonia, nitrate and nitrite).
• Aqua One 28L tank (plastic).
• Bucket.
• Small glass canister for water transfer (not pictured).
• Conveniently bucket-sized sive (not pictured).

Step 1: Driftwood

I love driftwood, but it’s a pain in the ass because it has a tendency to leech tannins and turn your tank water the approximate colour of tea.  The tannins aren’t dangerous to fish (and, arguably, are good for ‘blackwater’ fish like Bettas), but they make the tank look dirty, even though it isn’t, which is amazingly annoying.  Anyway, I read somewhere that the easiest way to ‘prepare’ driftwood is to boil in.  Hrm…

I knew that huge pasta pot would come in handy for something!  See how the pot water has gone a tea-like colour?  Anyway, the stick was too big to be fully submersed in the pot, so I boiled each end for about 15 minutes (as in, brought the water to a rolling boil, then started counting), then repeated that process about three or four times.  Oh, I recommend that before sticking any wood in any kitchen pots you give it a thorough rinse and soak in a laundry sink; a great evacuation of woodlice and other assorted greeblies came out when I first soaked the wood, and better in the laundry sink than the pot I’m going to use to cook next week’s dinner (yes I washed it).

Afterwards, I once again left the stick in the the laundry sink – fully submerged in hot water – to soak overnight.  It was still leeching tannins in the morning, but much less than previously.  I bet it’s still going to give me problems.  Stupid fucking driftwood.

Step 2: Substrate & Gravel

For those of you who’ve never kept a planted tank before, substrate is the fancy aquarist word for “shit that goes under the gravel to feed plant roots”.  Small rocks are not very nutritious even for aquarium plants, hence the need for something extra.  There are a bunch of products on the market, primarily designed to supply a slow stead release of iron (I’m not entirely sure why aquatic plants need iron – won’t it rust? – but apparently they do).  A lot of them have been banned in Australia as an environmental hazard – they get into rivers and cause algae explosions and so on – but Gem had something called Florapol, which looked adequately expensive.  The instructions on the box said to mix “1 part Florapol to 5-10 parts unwashed gravel” as a bottom layer, so that’s what I did.  I tried to get a bit of a slope going on; about half an inch at the front to an inch at the back.

As you can see, at this point I also buried my driftwood.

Anyway, you need to ‘seal’ in substrate (it clouds the tank water and causes algae if it gets ‘out’), so I went and washed all the rest of the gravel.  At first I was just sticking it in the bucket, adding water, swirling around, pouring water out and so forth, but eventually I went out and bought a large sive that sat neatly exactly across the top of the bucket, stuck the gravel in that, filled the bucket by running water through the sive, swirling it around a bit, pouring the water out and repeating several times.  That was heaps easier.  Oh, and don’t get gravel down your drain; it’s bad for the pipes.

I should probably say that in the end I needed a lot more gravel that I though I would.  Initially I thought I’d only use about half the bag I bought, but I ended up having to go out and buy another bag (of which I used about half) in order to get a sufficient cover over the substrate.

Anyway, hopefully here you can see the two layers (the wet gravel is darker, the soft brown lumps in the bottom layer are Florapol).  As you can see my slope got a bit less slopey as I backfilled.  I’m also not 100% convinced of the size of my gravel.  It’s 3mm gravel – roughly 1/8 inch – though most people seem to use sand.  I couldn’t find any appropriate sand, however, and not in quantity.  I know having the wrong gravel size can be detrimental to the tank (hard for plant roots to take hold, too many gaps for waste to fall into) but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what the ‘good’ size was nor find the article that mentioned it.  Oh well.

Step 3: Just Add Water

Water time.  I was a bit nervous during this stage, since it’s kinda the first point of catastrophic failure, which in this case means spilling water all over my comics and ~Mat [h]’s Lorn books.  You also have to be careful in this stage not to disturb the substrate, after all the time spent carefully sealing it in (for those of you who are wondering what I’m talking about, take a bucket of water and pour it onto sand and see how big a hole you can dig).

In the end, I filled up my bucket and sat it next to the tank, and used the canister I bought at the same time as the sive to transfer small amounts to the tank until it was full.  It’s recommended that you lay down a ‘piece of glass’ (if you’re reading the Florapol instructions) or – for the rest of us – a plate onto the bottom of the tank and pour onto that so as not to disturb the gravel too much, however the dirty great big stick made this kinda difficult.  Instead, I laid out the canister lid and poured into that.

I’m so clever!

Oh yeah, I stuck on the unplugged filter and heater before filling the tank.

Step 4: Chemicals!

Okay, I have a tank full of rocks, water and a stick.  At the stage I threw in my generic water ager… after baffling over the directions; it recommended 15mL for the specific tank it’d come with, but “10mL per 60L” as a generic formulae.  Like what?  I’m not very good at maths but that makes no sense whatsoever!  Figuring it’d have a week to settle anyway, I threw in the 15mL.

After that I cracked out my mini chemistry set and took baseline readings on pH, ammonia, nitrate and nitrite.  The pH was about 7.2, which is on the high end of acceptable for the fish and plants I’m looking at.  The other stuff was all zero, as expected in a tank with no living organisms in it.  These chemicals are part of the ‘nitrogen cycle’ in tanks, which is essentially how the aquarium’s ecosystem and filter turn toxic ammonia (fish poo) into nitrate and nitrite; one of which is toxic and one of which is plant food, and I can never remember which is which.

Step 5: Plugging In

After that, the only thing left was to turn on the filter… and turn it off again, go read the instructions and realise that duh you have to fill it with water first (another point of catastrophic failure).  Then on with the heater, and that was that.

Who’s that idiot who ghosted herself into the picture?

Anyway, that’s it.  The tank now has to sit for about a week while I monitor its water.  After that, it’ll be time to introduce plants; but first I have to figure out a system for lighting and CO2 injection (chemical injection is looking good at this stage, if I can get the products here).  Lighting’s going to be a PITA because of a bit of a dumb choice of tank.  Or rather tank lid (in retrospect I should’ve forked out the extra $30 and bought one of those fancy ones with the built-in light hood).  At worst, I’ll have to look into a free-standing desk light containing a proper plant fluorescent.  I still haven’t done a proper watts to litres calculation on the lights, though I’m going for a lower-light tank mostly because bright light is not great for Bettas (not to mention light intensive plants are generally harder to look after).

I’ll keep you posted.

• Tags » fishkeeping, planted tanks 101, tutorials
• Comments By » ~braken [h]
• Mood » fishy!