My tank from the show :56k:

Hiya folks, just thought I would start to do some threads in this section of the forum and hopefully encourage others to give planted tanks a go and you never know maybe even have a section in next years show if enough of us got started

Not sure where to start really, I think it may be best to just show you first of all how I put the tank for the show together as best I can, and that way you can pick up tips and ideas as I go along, any questions just ask away, I will give more technical details of the tank, how its fertilised, how it was planted and how its run etc.

This post will be picture heavy, but I think its probably best in this section of the forum if thats ok with the powers that be, hopefully it will be instructive for those that are interested in getting started.

I have another tank that I will post in a seperate thread later on, the other tank is only up and running a few weeks but is nowhere near finished so you can see how that one is put together as well, I also plan to put together another tank shortly using garden soil as the substrate so cant really get cheaper than that to start off, that tank should be ideal as a low light minimal maintainence type tank, but I will be running it as a highlight tank.

I will do a seperate post in a few minutes with the details (kids are looking for attention here)

Great stuff, I will be looking forward to the threads and updates. And maybe you can share with us your secrect mixture of ferts that you use on your planted tanks.

Looking forward to this.

Denis

I was toying with the idea of turning the tank I won from the show into a planted display, so I'll wait to see what you have to say first.

I'd don't mind what size the pics are "God Bless Broadband" :twisted:

What sized tank did you win Zale? Just out of curiosity in terms of how well it would look planted?

This type of layout is known as "Iwagumi" Iwa means rock in Japanese, gumi means placement, so it is the art of rock placement based on the style of Japanese zen gardens, usually either 3 or 5 main rocks would be used, this layout has 3 main rocks, this is known as sanzon Iwagumi (3 rock placement)

With this type of layout a lot of attention is paid to the individual rocks for the final layout, I choose the rocks from a total of 25kg of different size rocks, maybe 20-30 rocks in total, this type of rock is known as seiryu rock or mini landscape rock, I choose it because of the detail in the rock which suited the small size of the 60cm tank. What you are trying to do in small tanks like this is to make them look much bigger then they actually are, so everything must be to scale to fit the size tank you are working with, rocks, plants, fish etc.

Hardscape

First of all the hardscape must be chosen, I went through many different layouts over a week or so, just do a layout, leave it be for a day or so and just see if you can improve upon it, this is usually how I work, normally the first ideas are usually closest but can usually be improved upon. It helps as well to photograph them, because in competitions the front view is the most important, some competitions only allow one shot photographed directly from the front view of the tank.

The substrate is usually low at the front and higher at the back, this gives the tank better perspective when viewed straight on.

Just a couple of hardscapes I considered before the final one was chosen







The final layout



Planting

Just three plants were used in this layout, 2 pots each Tropica brand

Eleocharis parvula (LHS)
Hemianthus callitrichoides cuba or HC (middle)
Echinodorus tenellus or e.tenellus (grass plant RHS)

This is how you would plant HC to carpet a foreground

Remove the plant from the pot so you just have the rockwool.



Cut the rockwool just below the roots of the plant, couple of cms with HC.



Cut this section into many different pieces usually with a scissors, hand etc, the piece in my hand was split again into a smaller piece, you keep the rockwool on the plant, this makes it easy for planting, it acts as an anchor because the roots on HC are tiny.



You then get a tweezers and plant each individual plantlet in the substrate with the rockwool, the amount in the pic is just one pot cut into many different pieces, I used 2 pots in total of HC for this aquascape, I used the same planting technique with the Eleocharis parvula, most foreground plants can be planted this way, it saves a lot of time doing it this way.



This is the tank about ten days after planting, not much generally happens during this period, the plants have to settle in, at week 2 growth really starts to kick in, diatoms will start usually at week 2 also you can see them in this pic (browish bits on the plants) add otocinclus at this stage they will clear them up.



Five weeks later this tank is finished, add fish and enjoy (or do a fish show or something )





The spec for this tank

Stripped down Juwel record 60 with internal filter removed
60x30x30 cm tank 54l

Filtration Eheim 2211

Substrate ADA Aqua soil amazonia

Lighting 2x24W Osram T5 @ 9 hours per day

Fertilization routine

CO2 is added via a 2kg fire extinguisher 1 bubble per second gives me about 30ppm CO2 in this tank.

I diffuse it like this for this tank, I put a glass diffuser under the intake of the filter and the tiny bubles get sucked up and churned around in the filter, it then enters the tank fully dissolved in the water, the pic is just to show, the actual diffuser is much closer to the intake or the fish would get sucked up as well, this method works well for a tank this size.



Tropica Plant nutrition is added 5x1ml per week (trace or micro nutrients)

For macro nutrients I added 1.5ml per day of a PMDD mix (poor mans dosing drops, ie. DIY fert mix)

About 1ppm of KNO3 (potassium nitrate) is added daily
About 1ppm PO4 (phosphate) is added weekly in total, tiny bit each day.

Small amounts of magnesium (in the form of epsom salts) are added daily as well, around here the KH of the water is very low <2 so this is a wise idea.

Potassium K2SO4 are added in the form of sulphate of potash.

All are added in very tiny amounts daily in the pmdd mix so you just have one dose of fertiliser each day along with the trace mix (tropica plant nutrition) so 2 doses in total each day are added with a syringe before lights on.

I will give more details later about the fertiliser, probably needs a post by itself to explain in more detail, and in case anybody wonders it does no harm to the fish whatsoever.

Thats all I can think of right now, bloomin monster post, If I think of anything else important I will add it later.

Regards
Peter

Excellent tank!....one the best things at the show imo! well done!

What sized tank did you win Zale? Just out of curiosity in terms of how well it would look planted?

it's a rekord 60, I was going to ask was i big enough for a planted tank till I saw this

www.aquahobby.com/tanks/e_tank0603.php

@Zig, AMAZING you make it look so easy.

I know what I'm doing with the tank anyway

if i was to start one of these tanks where do i get all the stuff needed ps i got lost at the part where you add stuff to the tank every day.could i see a picture of the exact lighting you use..is co2 a must?where do you pick this up?does it cost much

Zig I love it. Is the fertilisation the same as the Estimative Index (EI) method?

What sized tank did you win Zale? Just out of curiosity in terms of how well it would look planted?

it's a rekord 60, I was going to ask was i big enough for a planted tank till I saw this

www.aquahobby.com/tanks/e_tank0603.php

@Zig, AMAZING you make it look so easy.

I know what I'm doing with the tank anyway

Those tiny tanks are just so cute. You'd have to wonder how practical they are in the long term though really. I'd completely forgotten about Marcos Avila's site. I used to waste a lot of time on it at work. :roll:

Thanks for the comments, i just spent an hour writing a comprehensive reply on how to fertilise this and other tanks but the board has logged me out and I have lost the information.......and im now major p*&^%D off.

I will reply again tomorrow if I get the time folks hope thats ok.

Thanks for the comments, i just spent an hour writing a comprehensive reply on how to fertilise this and other tanks but the board has logged me out and I have lost the information.......and im now major p*&^%D off.

I will reply again tomorrow if I get the time folks hope thats ok.

The same thing happened to me on the PFK forum a few weeks back. I was livid. No, if writing some long post I do it in Word, save it regularly & copy & paste it.

RESPECT! thats fxxxking amazing zig

WOW that is fantastic.

Great instructions too.

Ok take 2 this time in word, before I start just a warning that this will be a long post, hopefully not boring but switch channel now if planted tanks ain't your thing, the important links are at the end of the post if you want to skip through.

This method should work for most tanks and thats the good thing about it, once a tank has a decent amount of plants in it this should work fine.

Anyway the main topic for today, how to fertilise a planted tank, just bear in mind the tanks I run are medium/highlight CO2 injected tanks, I will just give you some background info first of all.

Planted tanks need to be fertilised properly or you will have many problems asociated with them ie. algae, this is especially true of highlight tanks, this in my experience is where a lot of people will try planted tanks and once they fail a couple of times they will probably give up, balanceing a highlight planted tank can be difficult without algae issues.

But the good news is a new method is on the scene called PPS Pro, this method I will outline here and give links at the end of the post, I have it running on the tank above flawlessly and another tank, although in the other tank I am having some problems which for the moment I am putting down to human error on my behalf, the algae I am getting is probably CO2 related so I have changed things around slightly to see if there is an improvement, no other algae is present in that tank so this is a very good sign that I will rectify it by the changes I am making, I will keep you updated on that one in the other thread I will make on that tank, there is one other possible thing it could be but better to make one change at a time when trying to pin down the issue, changes in planted tanks can take time to come about you do need patience, you need to change one variable at a time and then wait usually 2-3 weeks to determine its effectiveness.

Up to about a year or so ago I would have used the estimative index method of dosing or EI which I am sure some of you have read about it in PFK, this is a method whereby excess amounts of fertiliser are added each week to supply the plants with everything they need, loads of CO2, loads of fertiliser are added to the tank, everything is added to excess, and then you do a 50% water change each week to reset the tank from excessive fertiliser buildup, in theory and practice it works good, you get good growth rates, but some/lots of people find it a very difficult journey, tanks can grow great for a while and then they can suddenly crash and burn, algae all over the place, I have seen it so many times on the planted forums throughout the last few years, in my first year trying this method it was algae hell !! I learnt lots about algae, but it was a difficult learning experience until I started to modify it to suit my tapwater and setup, then I got much better results, but it was a tough learning curve. Until it was modified I found it gave me problems, If I missed a water changes it gave me problems, and for a beginner with highlight planted tanks that wasnt the easiest way to learn or enjoy the hobby.

Anyway since then my basic philosophy towards planted tanks has changed, dumping in loads of fertiliser each week just wasn't the route that I wanted to continue with, I was pretty certain that the over abundance of fertiliser was causeing me ongoing difficulties in one form or another, this was really reinforced by the fact that if I missed a water change the water quality (visually) the following week would deteriate rapidly and I would get a build up on the glass, which basically led me to believe the tank contained far to many nutrients in the first place, so I started to radically alter my dosing methods over the last year or so.

Most people that start with planted tanks will have been inspired to some extent by the work of Takashi Amano, and if you seek out his work or have any of the nature aquarium books of his you will note that the water parameters that he employs in his tanks are very lean, very lean indeed, total opposite to EI dosing, CO2 10-15ppm, nitrate usually less than 1ppm, phosphate levels hardly register < 0.25ppm, everything is dosed very lean with obviously spectacular results. Back then I didnt have enough understanding to know how this was achieved without inducing algae, it runs total opposite to what most hobbists in the West have/are doing these last few years, look at any of the dedicated english speaking planted forums and you will realise this, anyway this is where I started to look and question things for myself.

So I have been running leaner and leaner water column dosing this last year or so trying to juggle things around to suit my needs and then along came the PPS method maybe 3-4 months ago, and this fitted my new found philosophy nicely, its the best all in package I have found yet and definitely easier for beginners than EI dosing IMHO.

Not many people are using the PPS method atm (PPS = perpetual preservation system......don't ask, I don't get the name myself) most still use some sort of modified EI dosing but I bet a lot will change over soon enough once good results start to be seen with minimal algae from the better aquascapers around the net. This is probably the easiest method I have come across yet to dose low/medium/highlight planted tanks, the tank above is testamont to it really IMO that it works very well.

As i have said already this method is the total opposite to the EI method in that you dose very very leanly, no more excess, you dose daily just about enough for the tanks needs ,you are effectively limiting growth by the amount of fertiliser you add, this is a good thing IMO, growth is a bit slower using this method but on balance it works better, things don't get out of hand so quickly, its easier to solve problems with algae issues because of the slower growth, easier on the fish as well ,slower growth means less CO2 is injected into the tank so a better enviroment for the fish/critters all round, most importantly though you are dosing less fertiliser, there is less room for the excess ferts to get out of control in the tank and cause you problems that you may or may not understand, less room for error simply because the excess ferts dont exist because you are not adding them in the first place. The water quality is much cleaner also, visually and testing wise, I would go so far as to say the water can remain crystal clear after several weeks of minimal water changes, once the fish load is low and the plant load is high you will not have difficulties with dirty water.

Anyway look these are just my opinions, the EI method is still a very good method but I think for beginners it can be a difficult learning curve, because they don't fully understand what each of the additives are doing they find it hard to balance a tank correctly, that was me a couple of years ago as well. The PPS method is better because you are adding much less in the first place, for the time being this is the method I will use until new methods show me better results, but for now I like what I see, I will learn and adapt as time goes on with PPS, it does have limitations but for simplicity its hard to beat.

So enough of my bulls$$t heres the formula for PPS

K2SO4 Potassium sulphate - 59 grams
KNO3 Potassium nitrate - 65 grams
KH2PO4 Mono potassium phosphate - 6 grams
MGSO4 magnesium sulphate - 41 grams

Add the above to 1 litre of water, preferably distilled water.

Dose 1ml per 10 US gallons daily

Personally I would halve or quarter the amounts above and only make up small batches at a time, sometimes these DIY fertilisers will react with each other over time usually ending up with sludge in the container (generally due to un distilled water being used I may add) anyway better to mix up small amounts rather than spoil a whole batch, if you make up small batches it may be possible to use your tapwater as long as you are sure it contains no Nitrates or phosphates. Distilled water is difficult to get, Halfords sell 5 litre containers of deionised water for car battery topups, I think its €4.99, this is probably the nearest to distilled water you will get that is easily available, you could try your local motor factors as well.

You must also dose a general purpose trace fertiliser (called trace because it adds trace elements in small doses) at the recommended rate on the label of whichever one you use, personally I would recommend Tropica plant nutrition, this has very good chelators which keep the trace elements in the aquarium water longer, lesser cheaper fertilisers will have bad chelators binding them, and the trace elements will disspate from the water more quickly which is not a good thing.

Both fertilisers are important but the first one more so than the second, a tank can go quite a while without algae issues with inadaquate trace levels, but with macros fertilisers NPK (nitrate, phosphate, potassium) you will run into problems very quickly if they deplete usually resulting in the algae monster paying a visit to your aquarium.

You can buy chemicals in the link below or try and source them locally, although it can be difficult to purchase KNO3 Potassium nitrate because it can be used as a low grade explosive.

With Tropica plant nutrition the recommended dose is 5ml per week per 50l, for a small tank this is fine, so a 250ml or 500ml bottle will last a long time, but for bigger tanks dosing like this will cost quite a bit of money over the long term and people will generally dose a powdered trace fertiliser instead, the trace I use for bigger tanks is imported from the USA and is called CSM+B it is not the same stuff as on the Aquaessentials site, although Im sure that is fine as well, same rules apply though, try and use distilled water when mixing these up.

Read about PPS Pro below in better detail than I can give you, my ideas above are really just a summary based on previous experience, if there is anything you don't understand you can ask me here or join the APC site.

www.aquaticplantcentral.com/forumapc/pps...e-guide-pps-pro.html

www.aquaessentials.co.uk/index.php/main_.../index/cPath/145_146

regards
Peter

great article, well explained and illustrated

Thanks John, don't know about riveting reading though thanks for the compliment though.

Just a couple of things about the powdered fertiliser for others that may want to try it, you can save money as follows.............

KH2SO4 Potassium sulphate is basically sulphate of potash, this can be bought practically for nothing for a 1kg box full of it, gotta make sure you buy the right stuff though, and as luck would have it on a different forum a member there happens to work in one of the biggest manufacturers of garden fertiliser in the UK, J Arthur Bowers, anyway he was able to confirm that the brand they supply is pure KH2SO4, he even posted up pictures where they store it, and its all good, so you can save money buying that brand knowing that its a pure grade quality, a 1kg box I think cost me less than €2, cant remember exactly, it was cheap anyway for a lot of product, this is what I use, no problems to report.

J Arthur Bowers Sulphate of Potash can be purchased in any Homebase although Im sure its pretty widely available elsewhere, be warned though getting KH2SO4 to fully dissolve is practically impossible, but thats easily overcome and not really a problem.

MGSO4 Magnesium sulphate is basically epsom salts, this can be purchased in any chemist usually for dosing in a bath, a 500gram container costs €3.50 here locally, so its cheap as well.

If purchasing KH2PO4 Mono potassium phosphate only buy the smallest amount available, usually 250g, this obviously will last a long time when using it in quantities of only 6g per litre of solution.

Another way you can get PO4 or phosphate is to buy a product called Fleet Enema from the local chemist shop, this was fine for dosing With EI method but for PPS you will need the powdered version Im afraid.

No easy way to get KNO3 as far as I know, not yet anyway that I have found out, although in the USA a popular garden product is pure KNO3 used for killing stumps of trees, or stump remover as they call it.

Most garden fertilisers cannot be used for aquariums as they contain urea, which basically is a by product of ammonia and will probably give you instant algae problems as well as cause unknown damage to any livestock in your tank, so be careful what you add.

Thanks Derek I was writing away when you replied, thanks all the other guys as well, lampeye, Red empress, RichardmBunn.

Cheers guys

Catheloc, check out the Aquaessentials link I posted for all things planted tank, not the cheapest but its all there, Gavin in Whackers parnell st also does stuff for planted tanks as well, nice rocks, Tropica substrate etc and most importantly very good plants as well.

thanks ill see how i get on when i try it in a few weeks

Hi Zig.
Can I hi-jack your post and use it as an article.
Full credit to you of course.

well done zig. brilliant. the tank at the show was excellent and you ahve certainly started people thinking. i know at the show in hayling they have an aquascape class and i have to say they drew my attention even more then the fish. maybe next year we will have enough for our own planted class.

Anthony pm sent to ya

Nessa, welcome to the revolution, I think your husband won a tank last week perfectly suitable for a planted setup any pics of those tanks from the Hayling show.

will have a look through the pics i took and will post what i find. unfortunately the tank he won will be a marine setup and not allowed to touch it. ah well

zig its about time planted tanks got some serious mention.

well done on a great article.

ok zig, I have just printed off all the info you gave, I am definately thinking about trying it. I love your planted tank at the show, it looked amazing, i was really impressed!

Ok, so now to find a tank!!!

G

@georgina,
sounds like you really will need that mansion to put up all the tanks you are planning to put up

ok zig, I have just printed off all the info you gave, I am definately thinking about trying it. I love your planted tank at the show, it looked amazing, i was really impressed!

Ok, so now to find a tank!!!

G

Way to go.......good luck with it

zig you truly are the only person in Dublin that I know of (I I know a few! being a tropica agent and all ) that has taken the art (and it is an artform) of planting to where it can go. I doff my cap to you sir.Good luck in the ADA competition. I knoow for a fact that the tank inspired lots of previously uninterested people into would be plant nuts. I'm looking forward to your next project!