New here, Hi All!

[mikepetro]

My name is Mike Petro, and I live in the US.

I have been an avid African Cichlid keeper for over 30 years. I have recently acquired "Shrimp Fever" as well....

The main reason for the shrimp tank is to use it as a "veggie filter" for the bigger cichlid tank. They both share the same wet/dry sump. The heavily planted shrimp tank is helping to lower nitrates in the big tank, which in turn is helping to keep algae down. While the plants are the main feature, I added the shrimp to make it cool to look at, and now I am hooked on the little critters.

Anyway, I came here to learn more about shrimp keeping.......


This is my 150gal tank.



A 29gal tank with about 150 RCS.



And a 5gal nano tank just for fun, using it for cichlid fry right now.


Cheers,
Mike

[limz_777]

interesting, rcs is striving in your set-up , whats the ph ?

[mikepetro]

Yes, the RCS are doing great. I have many shrimplettes, several berried mothers, and the cycle continues.

My pH is 7.4
Temperature is a stable 79F (Heaters are in wet/dry sump)
Ammonia and Nitrites are 0
Nitrates are about 10
My TDS runs from 160 and up. I check it regularly, and when TDS reaches 250 I do a partial water change which will usually drop it to about 170-180.

The beauty of this is even though the shrimp tank is only 29gal, the total body of water is 180 gal since both tanks share the same wet/dry sump, so the water conditions are very stable as changes occur much more slowly.

It is working too, before I did this my nitrates in the big tank where around 40ppm, now they are 10 or less because of all the plants. Slowly the bad algae in the big tank is fading and going away.

The biggest problem is that I have to cut away lots of plants every week as they are growing so fast.

[mikepetro]

I starting having an algae problem in the chiclid tank due to high nitrates (heavy bio load). Water changes alone werent cutting it. So I looked at all kinds of nitrate reactors, refrugiums, veggie filters, and such and finally landed on doing a heavily planted tank to which I added RCS for interest. It worked too. My nitrates are now down to 10ppm or less and the algae is slowly fading away.

Here is my current filtration schematic:
Flowrates are actual, as measured with a flowmeter, so they take plumbing and head into account. Hehehe, I had about a 50% loss of flowrate vs the pumps nameplate rating.