Despite reading up a lot on AQ.com, I still made many newbie mistakes , sharing now so hope that others can learn:
1. Keeping soil damp while planting:
Somehow this totally slipped my mind, ended up planting with about 2 inches of water. Not so bad for planting, but I noticed that by not dampening the soil first, it tended to float a lot while pouring in the water (I did lessen the impact of the water by letting it flow onto a plate first), and it tended to erode some parts of the soil away from the slope.
2. Soaking driftwood
Should have done this earlier, bought my driftwood from GC, but only rinsed it dry. So the two things happened: floating DW (solved with some rocks) and the whitish stuff started appearing. Read that it's harmless, but still an eyesore.
3. Not securing the piping onto the lily pipe tightly enough.
This was a bad one. After setting up on Day 1, woke up the next morning to see half my tank water on the living room floor! I had setup my tank till 3am the night before, didn't push the rubber hose deep in enough onto the lily pipe for fear of breaking. Didn't think it would pop out but.... Remedied that morning by first dipping the hose into hot water, and then ensuring I pushed the whole hose right up to the protrusion for the sucker pad.
4. Empty CO2 container overnight.
Another bad one. I connected all parts of the CO2 on Day 2, left it overnight but woke up to find it totally empty on Day 3! After some troubleshooting, I narrowed down the cause of error to either the regulator not being tight onto the cylinder, or more likely the bubble counter. I'm using the ANS brass bubble counter, there's a small rubber o-ring on the outlet side (away from the check valve), that I put aside cos the CO2 tube couldn't fit in. Turns out that the rubber o-ring was supposed to go onto the check valve side connected to the regulator to create a seal. So next day I had to get a re-fill from NA, reconnect (ensured the regulator/tank was super tight) and put the o-ring at the bottom of the bubble counter.
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