First of all, a warm welcome to my blog and a big thank you for reading my first (long) post. Nothing fancy here but just thought it would be good to have my planted tank actually documented online (for my personal viewing or those who want to view it). By the way, if any of your fancy having your own blog with a subdomain, I can help sponsor one for you as I am running a web hosting business as a side line, of course, it will be hosted on my server and a sub domain will be given to you (yourname.vantagehost.net). Let me know if you’re interested. :)

The tank sits in the dining room and originally housed a Red/Golden Arowana of my dads’ that died a while back. After which I decided to take over the tank and have it planted. Initially I thought that it would be a walk in the park…. how wrong I was to assume (ass-u-me?) that. Anyways, enough with the introduction. Time to get back on the topic.

These are the specifications of the tank and its equipment.

Size of Tank: 5.0 x 2.0 x 2.0 feet
Volume of Tank: 566 litres / 149 gallons (US)
Filtration system: 2 x Jebao 918 canister filters
Peripherals: Surface skimmer, JBJ thermometer, internal CO2 reactor, bubble counter, CO2 tank (? litres), cheap solenoid (changing to dual guage (splitter?) solenoid, Resun chiller CL650 (:P thanks to Billy from AQ for loaning the unti to me – have yet to test it out; still searching for a external water pump)
Substrate: Sera Floredepot (x5 canisters) Lapis sand (x9 10KG bags – need more in future, thinking of having it changed to Seachem Onyx)
Fertilisation: E.I (Estimative Index) schedule, KNO3, KH2PO4 (Fleet Enema), Seachem Trace Elements, Seachem Flourish, Seachem Flourish Iron (Fe), Seachem Potassium (K), Dr. Mallicks LushGRO-AQUA (routine table shown below)
Water PH level: Before CO2 injection, 7.1, after CO2 injection, 6.3
Water KH level: Kept at 4 (no bi-carbonate added)
CO2 level: 30-35PPM
Mineral levels: Unknown
Artificial Lighting: 8 x T5HO tubes (Solite) 4 x 10,000K + 4 x 6,500K @ 10 hours daily

With all the items that I have (most were added during the initial journey), I first started the tank on January 1 (New Year’s day) from 9P.M all the way up to 3A.M in the morning.

The first plants I purchased from the LFS (local fish shop) around my place are as follows (reference pictures courtesy of Tropica.com)

Echinodorus tenellus
Echinodorus ‘Rosé’
Hygrophila difformis (bloody weed like plant)
Cabomba caroliniana (another weed like plant)
… and a lot more other plants (I was drawn to the different colorful and weird looking plants…)

I had 2 puny drift woods that were given F.O.C from the LFS (after purchasing so much things from them….) and came up with this design. (looks really awful… by the way, I could not locate the initial photo I took on 2 January 2006. The photo below is a later shot about 3 weeks after its initial start up. I added in the internal CO2 reactor and fishes by then)


So that I won’t embarrass myself, I kept this picture small :)
Ugly huh? I did not practise E.I then and faced problems with algae(s) (yup I had black beard algae, staghorn algae, green spot algae, brown algae, etc) you name it, I had it. After getting much assistance from the helpful bunch at AQ, I soon discovered about E.I and its practises. That I will cover a little later. After the advise I received, I added more plants to combat the algae problem and came up with the following ‘design’.

Same ugly design but more plants
During this period, my canister filters were spewing gunk back into the tank. It came out like a fountain, not only from 1 cansister but both!! The week after I decided that it was time to clean the filters and to add new bio media in. After the filter wash, I faced my second challenge. My fishes started dropping like flies. I initially bought 60 neon tetras, within a week, the number dropped to 45. I posted my problem in AQ and found out that it was actually my AC (activated carbon) that was leaking back the toxins. I found out that my carbon was about 1 1/2 years old when its expiry is a mere 6 months… So I immediately removed the AC and everything was back to normal.So came problem no. 3. Plant eating worms! I believe this was transported into my tank from the Blyxia Japonicas I bought from the LFS at my place. $#%!

Nice shell huh? They made cacoons out of the Blyxia leaves. Killed a total of nine.
Next came problem no. 4, weed control. My taiwan moss started growing this weird looking weed. Initially I thought it was new moss growing but to my shock, it was some weed. Below are the pictures.

Damn bladderwort weed.
I threw away the entire moss and reset the moss by tying new ones on it. I then found this weed growing all over my tank. So, I began the clearing up of the tank from this weed and all the visible algae too. This took me a back-breaking 5 hour job to do so. Once this was established, I then began to start to ask in AQ about the Estimative Index and finally understood how it worked and came out with the following schedule.Mondays: KNO3 + KH2PO4
Tuesdays: Traces + Seachem Iron
Wednesdays: KNO3 + KH2PO4
Thursdays: Traces + Seachem Iron
Fridays: KNO3 + KH2PO4
Saturdays: 50% WC, KNO3 + KH2PO4 + Seachem Potassium
Sundays: Traces + Seachem IronCycle of composition
NO3: 4 x weekly
PO4: 4 x weekly
K: 4 x weekly (inclusive of 1 major dose from WC on Saturday)
Fe: 3+1 x weekly (inclusive of Fe from Flourish Potassium)
Micros: 3 x weekly (Flourish traces, Flourish, LUSHGro-Aqua)Composition of each dosage at any one time.
KNO3 – 1.6 teaspoon (7.8ml) ~ 9.05PPM
KH2PO4 (Fleet Enema) – 0.15 teaspoon (1.2ml) ~ 1.42PPM
K – 5.70PPM from KNO3 + 8.86PPM from Seachem Potassium (100ml) (Saturdays)
Fe – 0.57PPM from K + 0.27PPM from Seachem Iron (15ML)
Flourish Trace Elements – 30ML each time. (once finished to move to LUSHGro-AQUA)
LUSHGro-AQUA – 55ML each time. (once finished to move to Seachem Flourish)
Flourish – 10ML each timeComposition of dosage per week
KNO3 – 36.20PPM
KH2PO4 – 5.68PPM
K – 31.66PPM (from KNO3 + Flourish Potassium)
Fe – 1.38PPM (from Seachem K + Seachem Iron)
Traces – Mg, Cu, Ca, etc (unknown range – instruction as per Seachem traces of 5ml per 80 litres)

You may download my E.I schedule here. Click here to download

After practising E.I, that was when the algaes started reducing significantly (manual removal of weed was still done) and the plants started growing like mad (the Difformis was an evidence of this).


The difformis grew to a mini tree and the vallisneria grew to about 1+ metre!
After getting a foothold on the E.I and getting a hard look at my tank, I decided to have the layout re-scaped. I knew it was going to be messy and had to sacrifice an entire Saturday or Sunday to do it. Since my own work keeps me busy from Mondays to Fridays, this was the only time I could do it. Before I started rescaping, I looked through some reference sites (due to my lack of creativity) and found Amano scape to be magnificient! Takashi Amano is a genius when it comes to aqua-scaping. His marvellous scapes were excellent designs and I was pretty much in awe about it! So I decided to come up with a rescape layout and to have the following. Credit goes to Goondoo (Billy) from AQ for his advise and ’secrets’. :)

I decided to have the ‘Triangle” layout
I went down to Teo’s Plant Farm at Lot. 50 Lim Chu Kang Lane 9 to purchase the hair-grass, java fern & driftwood. After returning back home and cleaning, soaking, etc the plants and driftwood for about a week, I finally took that one Sunday to do the entire re-scape. The mess was horrible, the roots from the difformis was everywhere in the substrate, not to mention the cabomba too!, What was worse was the tenellus, as it had ’sister’ planlets, it was really entangling. I had to cut, pull and replant all the tellenus. The total time spent on this was a total of 9 hours and after the re-scape, there was only 1 casualty, that being a hillstream loach. And the results are as shown below.

The final outcome
Later I received some feedback on improvements and hand a helping hand from standoyo (Stan) from the AQ forums. He gave me some recommendations on how I should improve. I have since followed his instructions and this is the latest outcome of how the tank looks like today.

The final outcome 2
I have shifted all the JF to the driftwood on the left and have replaced the JF on the right with Windelovs and petite nanas. The amazon sword plant on the right was pushed back and the blyxias (thanks to Knightx for the free blyxias) were shifted towards the front. As of the moment, I am satisfied with the current layout that I have but I believe I will slowly harness a better understanding of the Aqua Scaping world and have better ideas in future. Until then I guess I will keep a look out for better designs that I can take after or better, to come up with a design that I can really call mine. Until next time :) P/S: I guess in my next post, I will have the names of the flora & fauna that I possess listed out. Don’t really know the scientific names :P At the moment, these are the general names for the fauna I possess.*/Fauna Specs*/
neon tetras rummy nose black widows pygmy puffers emperor tetra spotted danios zebra & spotted danios black phantoms neon rainbows congo tetras flame tetras cherry barbs corys otos SAEs hillstream loaches yamatos malayan prawns ‘fresh-water’ prawns threadfins lampeyesReferences related to this entry:
Questions, questions, questions. Beginner at work (Part 1)
Healthy fish dying… :(
ID: Algae on my moss?
Beginner at work Part 2
Estimative Index by Tom Barr
Tropica Plant I.D