Thanks Dan. I like your old tank...looks very serene. The pots look cool. I actually wanted to put a pagoda statue in my tank, for the look and to provide another hiding spot for my loaches (I thought it would be cool for them to retreat to the Pagoda at night to sleep, which I'm sure they would). I wanted one similar but smaller than the one pictured below, but then I found out how much they cost and I changed my mind- lol.
In regards to going bare bottom, I have considered it, but my loaches like rummaging through the gravel too much for me to remove it. Every bare bottom tank I've seen, the loaches always look bored out of their minds (just my opinion, I have no way of knowing that and I don't mean to offend anyone keeping CLs in a bare bottom).
I like your thinking in regards to filtration. If I could design my system all over again, I would incorporate an over-tank plant filter along with a closed loop Ultima II 2000. I would just have to figure out how to get some sort of effective surface skimming and I think that would be the ultimate filtration. Adding a drip system would be the cherry on top, but my municipal water company adds chloramines, so I think I would have to get a dosing pump to add some conditioner along with the drip…not sure I want to go that route because it seems like there’s a lot of room for catastrophic problems (dose pumps fails, not realizing supply of conditioner has been depleted, etc).
Under tank sumps for tall tanks (like I have) are pretty inefficient in that it takes a lot of energy to pump water back up to the tank...fighting against all that head requires a big pump, so that's a major reason I would go with above tank filtration and/or closed loop. In other words, I think there are lots of advantages of designing a filtration system for large tanks more like a pond than for an aquarium.
Thanks for the links- good info in those articles.
