lanceduffy

I received my 2215 filter and 2217 impeller today. It was here waiting for me when I came home from work. It was scheduled to arrive tomorrow so I was pretty psyched! I played it cool and had dinner with the fam. but after dinner I went right to work.

I wanted to take this opportunity to re-plumb the inline heater and relocate some of the double-taps so it was easier to take the lily pipes off the tank to clean them. I ran to the LFS to get some 1/2 tube. I went to two LFS (the only ones in my smallish city) and a petco, the answer was the same, "we don't have any, go to Home Depot." I had to inform the owners of the LFS's that proper canister filter tubing from a company like Lee's is a bit stiffer and has thinker walls and resists collapsing on itself when bent. (at least this is my experience) At petco, I didn't bother giving this information. I think I'll have to wait until I go to Sacramento next week to get some proper tubing and re-plumb the filter.

I bought the filter and parts from Big Al's. Free shipping is awesome even if it is slow. I will say I was excited that it came a day earlier than expected. The filter came as a "Plus Kit" which means it has media. I was happy it came with the substratpro rather then the substrat. From reading it sounds like people like the pro stuff. I have some regular substrat that came with my 2213 and the pro stuff seams lighter. I installed the filter using 2 liters of Bio Rio from the 2213 and a little less then 1/2 the substratpro included with the 2215.

I am very impressed with the flow. I didn't even start it up with the 2215 impeller, but the flow with the 2217 impeller is great. I get a really nice vortex from the fake lily pipes. I will keep you posted on how the flow reduces over time.

What I am most excited about is the extra volume for biological filtration. It has been clear from the condition of my tank that the system has been working hard to deal with all the decaying plant matter that has resulted from the excel blyxa trouble I caused. I hope that this extra flow and media helps with mechanical and biological filtration and can serve as a buffer for when I do something wrong.

Finally, the Ember Tetras seem to be having a really good time playing in the moving water.

Photos of the cabinet with the new filter and the lily pipe vortex to come.

lanceduffy

Came home from work and all the water was still in the tank. I think I did an OK job on the filter install last night! Also there was no surface scum build up. Yay! If I haven't mentioned it before the fake lily pipes are from Aquatic Magic.

I snapped some pics with my phone tonight.

Vortex from above:


Vortex from the side:


Inside of cabinet with the new hardware. Note - the heater should be on the discharge side, I have to so some special things during priming to make sure the heater is full of water. This is one of the plumbing things I want to fix:



Full tank and inside cabinet shot. I installed a light inside the cabinet when I built it. It has been priceless:


Thanks for looking.

lanceduffy

2/5/12:

lanceduffy

Mods, how do I make this post a Journal where I can have updated pics and my comments on the first post?

lanceduffy

After looking at these photos it is very evident that the rock on the left needed to be moved forward. I also need to trim my glosso.

lanceduffy

I usually do all tank work after lights out. My rationale for this is that it gives the tank a period with no lights to recover from any mess I might make. Today I did a major cleaning just as the lights came on. We'll see???

After seeing George Farmer's post about what he learned from "Scree" I thought it was time to buy a wire brush and clean up those rocks.

So I cleaned the glass and took the water down half way. I scrubbed the rocks with the wire brush. This got rid of a bunch of the green stuff. I know that all that green was in the water column and the water was pretty cloudy so I took the water down to about an inch in the front.

Then I filled it, and wanting to get rid of any and all nasties in the water column, I took it down to an inch again. This time I took 10ml of excel and put it in a shot glass. I dipped a toothbrush in the excel and scrubbed the rocks again. I was careful not to let the excel get on the blyxa.

After I filled the aquarium and did all the other post WC stuff I saw a tiny black object in the water, it was about 1mm big. It was a single shaft and at the top of it was a plume. It looked like a dandelion seed in the wind. I don't know what a BBA spore looks like but my imagination says that this is what it looks like. So I scooped it outta there pretty quick.

This made me wonder, "should I turn all the lights out and hunker down?" At first the answer was yes. Then after my 1pm on Sunday Gin and Tonic, I decided to keep the standard photoperiod on. I figured that there are nutrients in the water and light in the room, I might as well give the plants the light they need to grow and suck up the nutrients because if not the ambient light might give the algae enough light to use the nutrients. We will see.

I have learned that I hate cleaning rocks. I let them go a little thinking that the All Powerful Wire Brush would make cleaning a snap. It didn't, I mean it was effective but it still was not easy.

This hobby has constantly taught me that it is much easier to be diligent about doing maintenance and cleaning up small messes as they happen, rather then to let maintenance go and have to clean up big messes later.

Do78521

awesome post, i really enjoy reading about the progress of your tank.. your tank looks great btw.

lanceduffy

Thanks Do. there has been quite a bit of learning here. As the nutrients in the aquasoil became depleted, I got back into EI on this tank. Results have been great growth but with more nuisance algae. I wipe glass and change water every two or three days. I trim leaves with tiny amounts of BBA on them daily. Balance has been hard to achieve. I will put up photos and a more detailed post soon. Thanks for looking.

lanceduffy

Ok, so I am bad at journaling. I also expected to get a lot more feedback from this. Well, no matter. I am not bothered and I hope you are not.

I got some unexpected good news and I am moving from CA to MD at the end of this month.

I had been doing a bunch of pruning and fert scheme tests with this tank. In the end I wanted a lower maintenance, iwagumi layout. Well that still meant that, even with slower growth, water changes 2x week was still a good idea. Low maintenance, hehe.

For the past three weeks, I have been dosing heavy EI for the tank size, running CO2 at 3.5 bubbles per second, Milwaukee bbl counter (i have v. hard H2O) and blasting it with 3 bulbs of my FNI fixture. for 9 hours.

Now because I am breaking this tank down soon I have been kicking things into overdrive. I am gonna add the 4th bulb and watch her zing, or crash. I WILL post picks sometime this week, right before this thing gets torn down.

Thanks for watching

AaronT

Sorry I missed the updates on this. It's looking quite nice now. Where in MD are you moving to? Come check out our club sometime.