Oreo

Hi everybody! Sorry for the long post. Please bare with me & help me out.

Background info:

I've been keeping an over-stocked 30gal (all fish, no plants) international freshwater community tank for a couple years & now that I'm fully up to speed on how to care for my fish I've decided to upgrade to a 110gal (48"x18"x30"). With so much more space I really want to aquascape this thing to look awesome. I've got some ideas about what I'd like to do but I really need help making sure all the parts of the puzzle are going to work well together- particularly the balance between CO2 for the plants, O2 for the fish, lighting, surface agitation, and substrate.



Currently, I have this livestock that will be moving into the new tank:

• a plecco
• a clown loach
• a black ghost knife
• a 6" goldfish, & a few other small ones
• a patriot crab
• a columbian shark
• a couple other fish I can't remember the name of
• and possibly an old-fart dwarf african frog if I can get him to play nice with the others.

• In the future I'd like to add a couple newts if my LFS ever gets the ones I want back in stock.

The truth is though that my girlfriend & I really can't help ourselves when we're in the LFS, so I expect this tank to be heavily stocked with all types of compatible & incompatible fish eventually.



For light, I'm figuring on four HO-T5's for a total of 200w, or 20,000 lumens. I understand this to be a "moderate" ammount of light.

I'd like to use a mix of black onyx sand & white crushed corral sand as a substrate... if this will work ok for my plants. (Will it?)

I think this will be a moderately planted tank. I'm planning on a single large piece of driftwood as a focus with some tall plants closely around it, and some very short ground-cover plants surrounding that. I will have an artificial rock-wall background, so I definitely don't want to obscure the whole thing with the plants.

I definitely don't want to add CO2 if I can get by without it, but I will if I have to. I have a few specific questions about this though...

• Do you think I can get by without adding CO2 on this setup?

• If I must add CO2, I'm very concerned about maintaining a consistent pH for my fish. Can I? & how do I, without a lot of work? (I'm ALL about convenience & a tank that runs itself.)

• If I must add CO2, I've been told not to use surface agitation. In this case, will my fish have enough oxygen in the water? If not, what do I do about that?

Thanks for reading the whole post if you made it this far. Please do comment on anything & everything. I know my fish selection is screwy. I'm just going to have to do the best I can with that though.

 

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davemonkey

You can get by w/out CO2, but watch out for serious algae problems. I suggest flourish excel to supplement carbon.

You also might consider reading in the El Natural forum for some tips/ideas on low-tech.

Plants that you could use without CO2 (that I've had experience with): Vallisneria, Swords, and the low-light plants (see the Plant Finder at the top left of the page...in the gold banner).

Hope that's helpful.

-Dave

Edit: Also, while your tank may be too big for DIY CO2, you might read up on it. I took all the info I could find on small set-ups and applied it to my 50 gal. I'm using 2 DIY CO2 bottles (1 gallon, but with the ingredients the same as for a 2-liter) and dosing excel to supplement and I've noticed great differences now that I've got the CO2 going. I let it go day and night and have had no problems with oxygen, pH, fish health, etc...just a thought.

hoppycalif

Maintaining a pH isn't a good goal for a planted tank. The plants will take care of keeping the water conditions good. Crushed coral is not a good substrate for plants unless you are trying for a very hard water tank for the fish that prefer that. Your light is too intense to do without some CO2, in my opinion, but with less wattage or less efficient lights, you could do a non-CO2 tank. One way to do that is the el natural method - see the forum on that subject for more information about that. That is the least work for a planted tank, once it is set up and stable.

Oreo

I'm not trying to be fanatical about pH. I just don't want to kill the fish with fast wide fluctuation's. What ever my fish can tolerate, I'm fine with.

I've read something about a pH / CO2 controller solenoid that will turn off the CO2 automatically based on pH. How good / reliable are these types of systems? WHere can I find a good one?

WHy is crushed coral not good? What about Onyx sand?

I run a UV sterilizer- will this prevent algae problems?

hoppycalif

Coral is calcium carbonate, which slowly dissolves in water. This means the hardness, both GH and KH will slowly rise and keep rising until you change water. That isn't desirable for a planted tank. Onyx sand also adds carbonates (KH) to the water, but at a very slow rate, so some people use it and like it.

If you inject CO2 the best way to control it is to set the bubble rate that gives you about 30 ppm of CO2 in the water, as measured with a drop checker. Then as long as that bubble rate stays the same the amount of CO2 in the water will stay about the same, and the pH will be stable. I don't use or recommend using a pH controller because it isn't the pH that should be controlled, but the ppm of CO2 in the water.

UV sterilizers do not prevent algae problems. You can prevent algae problems by using an appropriate amount of light, with the lights on time limited to 8 to 10 hours maximum, with good complete fertilizing, good CO2, good water circulation throughout the tank, good cleanliness of the tank, substrate and water, and overall good tank maintenance.

pH fluctuations due to CO2 will not harm the fish. Having too much CO2 in the water will harm the fish, whatever the pH is.

 

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