60 gallon planted community setup

[Wiggie]

Pothos helps remove nitrate, and some other nutrients.
I always try to keep my nitrate level at between 2 and 5ppm.
Water changes do it best, but any help I can get is worth it to me,
and in some of my tanks where my cichlids consider aquatic plants a salad bar, pothos is sometimes not eaten. The roots also provide shelter for fish, that are eaten by bird in nature, and I like the natural look.
.
They do tend to collect detritus, and need to be occasionally

Thanks im going to try this on a small scale and see how it goes.

 

[duanes]

I have had tanks painted wit a few different colors.To me blue in theory should be good right, ocean blue.
But in my tanks in looked weird and un-naturlal.
Here are some examples.
Nosfertu bartoni with the blue
Nosferatu with a black background

planted tank
planted black

and just forgeries,
styro painted black

 

[duanes]

Hate spell check, above should read "just for grins".

 

[Dis]

Sorry about your daughter. I prefer black and I have seen a bunch of tanks that look nice in the darker greens

 

[Muni]

Sorry about your daughter. I prefer black and I have seen a bunch of tanks that look nice in the darker greens

Thank you. Shes doing ok after the doctor bent her arm back straight. Kid gave me a panic attack.


I think i'm going to go with black. With some brighter lights for the plants and the bright white sand. It should look pretty good.

 

[Muni]

So I went with black. Looks good with the white sand. I'm going to need a better light though. The led strips that came with the set aren't gonna cut it for long with plants.

Needs a little touch-up paint as I painted it in place with only about 5 inches behind the tank. Little difficult to reach everything well.

 

[Muni]

Ok, after much debating, testing, cleaning, soaking. I put 2 pieces of petrified wood into the tank for a bit of contrast. Still looking for a large center piece of driftwood to moss up. But both of my LFS have closed so It's kind of a desert here for options.

And a close up of one of the pieces. They are much darker on the bottom, nearly black, but didn't want to much dark in there.

 

[Muni]

Humm. So I came back to make an update and it seems Photobucket killed all my links until I pay $400. SOOOO I'll be fixing as many of the links as I can. I'll start in this thread.



Edit - Nevermind. Seems I can't go back and edit my older posts. Must have been archived at some point.

 

[Muni]

So I apologize for another long break. Just been a crazy summer with my oldest breaking her arm, legal stuff, 80 hour work weeks, and my son being born end of July. My tanks and time were put aside for a while.

The tank is still up and doing pretty well. As I expected the LED strip that came with the tank wasn't enough to keep the plants alive. I wasn't expecting them to flourish but was at least hoping to sustain them until I got a better light.

I lost the red Betta that is in the tank initially. He got quite bloated and I think it was a diet issue since he was getting general fish flake and sprinlina pellets. Both from Ken's, Great stuff, just maybe not ideal for Betta's.

I also special ordered 6 Clown loaches from Petsmart. Which I was hesitant about since I always find sick fish there. But I no longer have a LFS, just the 2 big box shops. One didn't even survive the trip home. I lost all the loaches over the course of 2 weeks in my hospital tank. They got a fungal infection almost immediately. They had only been in the tanks at my Petsmart for 20 hours before I got them. They didn't call me on delivery day as I had requested.

Here is how it looked.

 

[Muni]

Here is how it looked this morning after 6 months of low light causing the plants to melt off. I was part way into a water change when I stopped to take this. You can see the "plant Soil" has lost a ton of color as well.

I added a few more fish last weekend and they are doing well, a dwarf powder blue gourami, a common pleco, and a pair of neon tetras.

I started redoing the design today a bit in preparation for my new light that is on the way and and CO2 injection system. This was meant to be a show piece but it has fallen aside a bit to as mentioned previously. Not neglected, just not giving the time to it I wished I could.