Can heckels be kept in the living room

[DiscusOnly]

My experience with Heckels so in the short period I had them.

1. setup a 180 gal in the basement with just sand and a few dw. Took them about 2 weeks to really adjust. Out and about swimming all the time after that too 2 weeks, even when I am in the room.

2. This is one mistake that I made. I added plants.. lots of them thinking that it would look cool to fill the entire background of a 6 foot tank with corkscrew vals. With the plants.. they started hidding whenever I am in the room. This went on for weeks until last weekend.

3. I decided I had it.. so I moved them up to my foyer with lots of traffic. I never have problem with discus there (even wild green). For the past few days.. they get startled so easily. The one good thing is that they are swimming around and not hidding, even during the day. It's probably going to take a few weeks but I shall wait and see. I decided that this is where they are going to stay for good.

[Apistomaster]

I have had Heckel groups many times over the years and I find they are most at ease in a tank with fine sand and some branches of wood. When I have tried plants all was fine at first but as the plants grew and took up more space I saw less of the Heckels.
I used various Amazon Sword Plant species, mainly the big broad leaved type, Echinodorus bleheri and the shorter E.parviflorus "Tropica" variety.

I now use few to no plants in my wild Discus tanks. Sometimes I will grow a couple large Anubia barteri attached to some of the wood. I have dual lamp HO T-5 lamps in my fixtures but I only use one lamp per fixture so the lighting is not too intense and some of my pieces of wood are large and long enough to reach the surface, The Discus often like to rest underneath these overhanging branches.

I think of Heckels as a shy species but they can and do adjust to most locations. I think in terms of their sheer comfort, greater height above the floor is more important than location. They tend to instinctively take flight when subjected to moving, overhead shadows.

I have kept them happy within the environment of a trafficked retail fish shop or in my home.