Growing out in planted tank

[pastry]

ash, thanks. i guess it'll be like most projects i do: screw up a few times before getting it right i'll see what i can do. this may be a fall project. i think i can snag at least a 10 gallon from my wife's classroom to use as an initial experiment (keeping it small). guess i'll set it up initially in my "man shack" (the shed; i don't have a garage) so that i can figure out a design that creates the least amount of noise. i'll look into the mag drives. now you know how sometime filters start off quiet for months or longer but end up noisy? do mag drives do that? i've had the canister up for over a year and i LOOOVE that booger... totally silent!

meanwhile, i think i can revert back to some old plants that used to grow TOO fast in my aquarium. as far as plants in the tank, i just use swords, water lillies, val, and anubias. i don't want to say that plants take a backseat to the discus but i definitely put my discus first in the planted display. i'm certainly not "there yet" in regards to keeping it even.

well i've added some crushed coral to the tank and hopefully that keeps my pH and GH/KH from dropping. i used to like it real soft and acidic for wilds a looong time ago and then my last bunch was very happy with the water but if i'm going to have a shot of growing these guys & gals to a respectable size then i need to increase all of the above (yet i'm always afraid of going over 7.0 pH due to ammonia!). i've seen all sorts of info on SD and sometimes confuses me on what works, what doesn't, and what's just absolutely wrong to do. i hate messing with more than a few ways of messing with water conditions but i'm to the point where i need to add the coral to steady it out. pleeeeeaaase if anyone thinks otherwise or even supports that then let me know. meanwhile i guess i need to start adding pics since i'm a hypocrite by liking those who post with pics soooo much more. again, three are from Forrest which went through Kenny which went through Eric of Carolina Discus (all AWESOME guys... I think everyone knows that already though) and 5 from Harry Marsh of which I could only dream that they'll look as good as all the RT's that he has!

[Elliots]

Let me see if I have the basics of this post. You want to grow out less then 10 two inch and three and a half inch discus in a 150g planted tank? Is that the correct number of discus and tank size? Good for you! Please keep SD posted on the results. I was going to try that myself but it appears to take a lot of work that I may not want to do and also a high degree of difficulty. Due to legal problems with my landlord I have my tank and set up ready to go. I will try for some new legal opinions from friends this week and hopefully start up during the week. I was going to start with 4-5-6 inch fish, depending on what Hans has when I am ready. It looks like no discus for me to at least Oct-Nov instead of my hoped for Aug-Sept. I am very curious about your results and I will read the old postings listed on this site.

[pastry]

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[pastry]

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This one is an old pic with my old group and my son enjoying watching them

[Kal-El]

Wow you have such a nice planted tank setup. I'm sure you will not have any issue growing them with your experiment.

[pastry]

thanks kalel. for a while there i ended up having too many plants (they took over). i felt bad throwing some nice swords in the trash ontop of water lillies & val. ah well... i'm sure it'll all come back since i kept a little bit of everything. i do want to add a red plant sometime but just not sure what exactly.

[Elliots]

Pastry, you threw your plants away? You had no one to give them to? You could not trade them back to you LFS for a store credit? You do have a beatiful tank now.

[pastry]

Thanks Elliots! Nope, I usually end up giving my wife some of the plants for the aquariums that she has in her classroom but at that time she was still off for the summer and didn't want to drop by her school. Otherwise, I really don't know anyone else in the area that keeps an aquarium (I never thought about that until now). Also, I'm not sure if the LFS would take plants... but then again I've never asked. I'll ask later this week when I go pick up a small school of lemon tetras.

[Kal-El]

Pastry, next time you want to throw away nice healthy plants let me know and I'll pay for shipping to ship them to me lol. Anyway, keep us posted on your progress I'm looking forward to hearing your updates and progress on this experiment.

[pastry]

Will do Kalel! I guess I'll visit this thread from time to time and give updates... hopefully good updates! Otherwise, still a lessoned learned that others can take away from

[strawberryblonde]

Hi pastry,

I had a VERY quiet sump, and it was fully exposed (open stand, no sides or doors). To get it quiet I did a couple of things.

1) I had an overflow box, which can create a nice splashing noise on its own, so I lined the inside with thin poret foam strips (the box inside the tank). It served well in making it quieter and also grabbed a lot of the crud that managed to flow in there, so I could just pull out the strips every other day and rinse them off in the sink.

2) On the outside box that attaches to the tank I put poret foam squares over the two hose openings. I just placed it lightly on top of them, then moved them around till the gurgling noises all disappeared. I removed them every other day and rinsed them too. Amazing how much crud they collected that would otherwise have ended up in my sump!

3) My overflow box had flexible hoses that ran down to the sump, so, rather than leave them splashing water into the sump, I stuck them down into the water. No more splashing noise!

4) I used a mag pump. It was extremely quiet for the first few months, and then I started hearing a slight hum, or vibration noise from it. Cleaning didn't fix it, so...here we go again... I plopped it on top of a piece of thin poret foam. =)

My husband never realized how quiet my sump was till I switched over to an AC110 and a sponge filter. All of a sudden he was complaining about the noise. LOL

[pastry]

strawberry blonde -- you might need to change your name to "poret foam squares" after that one meanwhile, i'll do a little searching on some of your old posts to see if you ever took a pic of your overflow box but if you never posted one then do you have one available to post? That foam to you sounds like duck tape to us men... any time something needs fixing: Duck Tape.

[strawberryblonde]

Yesssssssssssss, Duck Tape for everything from water changes to fixin' my toilet and Poret foam for the rest. LOL

I managed to dig up 2 pics of the overflow and one shows a portion of the sump as well.

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[Elliots]

That is an unusual shape and size tank. Is it 31" high? What are the dimensions?

[Elliots]

My last post was to Toni not the OP.