120cm. Green Neons Fly

[cicjay]

Hey everyone! Been a while since I've shown any of my tanks but thought I'd show this one as id like some feedback and advice on it since I've been having a nightmare with algae issues and plants not growing. Basically, it was like this up until a couple of days ago..

Dirty, murky, algae covered plants that were not growing. (sorry about the picture. iPhone)
Substrate is Columbo Flora Base. Top layer turned to mush pretty quickly. Not happy. Pressurised Co2 and easy carbo added. Tropics PN+ ferts. 5ml a day. Aaaaaaanyway. Changed it up a bit mainly because I hated it and the moss on the wood was a mess. So it looked like this.

Knew I needed more plants. So a few days and a lot of water changes later, I added 2 x bacopa Australis for the dark corners
2 x rotala sp. Green
Polygonum sp.
Pogostemon erectus
And something else I just can't remember.


Thanks.

[cicjay]

Been a busy boy today. Got 20mm outer diameter clear acrylic tubing, a heat gun, pipe bender and sand. Created this after plugging the end and blowing.

20mm pipe is bigger than the hose to my filter so I heated the end and stretch it over.

So here it is. Not the greatest of lily pipes, but its creating great flow and is seriously inconspicuous in the tank.

Love it. LOVE IT!!
Next up, the intake.

[cicjay]

64 views and no comments? Are the pictures loading up? Or is it just that bad?

[gtbROX]

I'm not that experience with planted tanks and aquascaping, but I recommend that you keep some shrimp, especially the algae-eating/scavenging ones, I find that they do a great job of keeping algae off of fine-leaved plants and mosses and other bushy plants. They also pick off algae very well in general. My 5g tank with my A. australes is currently heavily planted with riccia and java moss without an algae issue anymore thanks to the cherry shrimp. Ottos help a lot too, but for your tank size you'd probably need a lot of them. For the mosses on your wood, I think riccia would look nice on it too, and as a plus, it grows really fast and soaks up a lot of the ammonia/nitrates in the tank quickly especially if you have a CO2 input (pressurized injector, yeast-based, liquid, etc) and high lighting, and it would give a nice lush green look to the driftwood and grow pretty fast. You could also use some java moss at the base of the driftwoods on the substrate too since they absorb ammonia readily and can grow fast under good conditions. Anyways, this is just my 2 cents on the matter, but otherwise it's looking really nice after your water changes.

[Peanut8787]

Great work ahead. I got some doubts. Why is your wavemaker facing the front instead from left to right? How do you maintain your white sand?

[David Moses Heng]

Add more stem plants, remove the wave maker , adjust your co2 input and lighting period.

[Shadow]

actually the scape is quite nice, I do like the hardscape, just need to wait until it mature

What moss are you using? Look like java moss. If it is then you need to trim regularly otherwise it will give you a messy feeling.

I saw you have drop checker on the right hand side. What is the color? Try to aim for light green.