Jan 2018 - Aquarium Roundup

Window Aquarium

22 litre Window aquarium with 8 White Cloud Mountain Minnow. My home made Matten filter is working well. The plants are dosed with EasyCarb and fertilizer although the growth not great - possibly due to gravel substrate.

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Round Vase Aquarium

6.5 litre Vase aquarium. This tank has an air lift filter made from a drink bottle and plastic pipe. The media is Alfagrog. There is some clay granules plant media in the base and then this is covered with Alfagrog. Two baby WCMM live in the tank. No extra heating is installed the fish are happy at room temperature at the moment this is 18.3c. (It is useful to have cycled media available for new projects)

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White Cloud Minnow Winter accommodation.

The minnow in this 27 litre cube aquarium were in the summer tub pond last year. I brought them into the house when the weather turned cooler in October. There are the original adults plus about 15 young fish. The Vase and Window aquarium contain another 10 young fish that were bred in the tub last summer. I will transfer them outside again when the weather warms up. Aquarium is at ambient room temperature of about 18c.

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Plant grow-out Aquarium

I use this 27 litre aquarium as a stock tank for growing on plants to use in other tanks. There are some Red Cherry Shrimp in there, together with a Cappuccino Snail, Ramshorn and Malaysian trumpet snails and 2 amano shrimp. A small Chinese Hillstream Loach also wanders around the tank. The rear integrated filter and high plant growth seems to keep the water in good condition and the loach seems to be doing well in this tank.

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Red Cherry Shrimp Aquarium

This is my 24 litre Red Cherry Shrimp Tank. I filter is with 2 Air Sponge filters. I had trouble with filament algae so I cleaned this out as much as possible and added extra plants to absorb nutrients. I have also increased the amount of water changes I do. The shrimp seem to be doing OK with some breeding.

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Live bearer Aquarium.

This is my "Livebearer" aquarium It is 55 litres and contains Endler guppys and Red Wagtail Platys. In addition I have 4 Corydoras and a Siamese Algae eater in there. The substrate in Clay granules and the plants are fed and dosed with EasyCarb. It is filtered with a sponge airlift filter and internal power filter.

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AquaNano 40 Aquarium.

My "AquaNano 40" - 55 litre aquarium has a heavy growth of Cryptocorne plants. It contains 8 home bred Kribensis together with 3 Ember tetra and 4 Red Cherry Barb. It is probably too heavily stocked but is has a large integrated filter at the rear with Sponge and BioHome media. I also do frequent 50% water changes.  So the water quality is very good and the fish are doing well. It has been set up for about 4 years now so I will refresh it this summer.

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Pond update 3

The summer tub pond has done well, it is now the beginning of September 2017 and over the past 4 days or so the water has gone crystal clear. I am not sure how algae blooms work but the only thing that has happened is that the days have been less bright and the sun is now lower in the sky resulting in less light.
The water temperature is 17 deg C at 09:00 the air temp is about a deg higher. The fish still seem very happy dashing about and feeding. I have an aquarium cycled in the greenhouse ready to receive them if the temperature drops much further I will leave the tub filled though as the resident Toad and Frog are still making use of it.
Approx 20 fry in the green house grow-out tanks are doing well. The external BOYU filter is working well, keeping the water in that tank very clear. The fish in the other tank with the Alfagrog home made filter are doing well but the water is slightly cloudy so I will have a go at making an airlift sponge filter to provide mechanical filtration.

Fry tanks in greenhouse

I have been having some success with my 2 fry tanks that are in the greenhouse. One is filtered using the home made "Alfagrog" airlift filter (that I described in an earlier post) the other is filtered using a BOYU external canister filter. Both are performing well and the fry appear to be growing.

The fry have been extracted from the outside tub pond, where the White Cloud Mountain Minnow have lived during this summer. I have placed about 12-15 fry in the two tanks to grow on. The temperature in the tanks is about 23°C @18:00hrs after a warm day and it seems to drop to the high teens during the night. The fry seem quite happy. I also notice there are at least 4 fry in the pond that are about half an inch long but it has quite a lot of algae growth so they are difficult to see.

Fry tank with BOYU filter

Fry tank with Alfagrog air filter

I also made a hood light from some 9mm plywood. It is 18" long and is drilled at each end to receive a glass tube LED unit that I bought as a submersible light. It comes on for a couple of hours in the evening via a timer switch. It is quite effective though it would not be bright enough for plant growth.

 

D.I.Y airlift filter using Alfagrog

This is a D.I.Y airlift filter I built using the following items:-

• a plastic drinks bottle
• a short length of plastic pipe
• an air stone
• some Alfagrog filter media.

To build the filter...

The plastic pipe was drilled several times through the bottom inch or so, with a 3/16" drill (5 mm).
The plastic drinks bottle was cut to about 7" tall and the label was removed.
The pipe was held in the bottom of the bottle while the E25 Alfagrog was poured into the space around the outside pipe until the bottle was full..
Finally an air stone was inserted down the pipe to the bottom of the bottle. The filter was lowered into the aquarium and the air stone was connected to the air pump.

Note: this filter is a biological filter, it reduces harmful pollutants such as ammonia and nitrites from the water. It does not remove particles of matter from the water, a mechanical filter with sponges etc. is required to do this.

The filtration process...

As the air bubble rise up the pipe they carries along the water in the pipe, this water is replaced with water that passes through the holes in the base of the pipe, this water in turn is drawn down through the "Alfagrog" from the aquarium.
Beneficial bacteria will collect and multiply on the "Alfagrog" and as water flows over this material the water will be purified of any ammonia and nitrites it contains by these bacteria. The resultant nitrates produced by the bacteria will be absorbed by any plants present and can also be removed with water changes.

More information about Alfagrog can be found by visiting http://www.alfagrog.com/index.html

Invertebrate Tank update. 15th August 2017

Invertebrate Tank update. 15th August 2017

As can be seen the invertebrate tank is doing well. The plants are growing well now and the shrimp, snails etc are all thriving. However there are still no sign of any baby Red Cherry Shrimp though, even though there has been several shrimp carrying eggs. I am still trying to investigate why this is happening. As I mentioned on a previous post, it may be due to the high water flow, so I am preparing a tank with a Hang-on-back 'waterfall' type filter. I have also just ordered some 'Alfagrog' to use in a home-made 'air-lift' filter, so it will be interesting to see how this performs.