Planted Fluval Edge - Future Shrimp Tank

**Dubble** · 30th Nov 2012, 21:38

Hey everyone

New guy here, I have decided to turn my desk tank into a planted shrimp tank. I've started with some plants and plan on adding the shrimp in about a month. Right now I just have a few goldfish in my tank. I also ordered 2 Assassin Snails because they are just too cool.

I recently added eco-complete as my substrate and planted some java fern and dwarf hairgrass. Hopefully today, they were supposed to be here yesterday, my christmas moss, dwarf baby tears, and marimo balls arrive. I also ordered java moss, but I think I'm going to leave it out or just add a very small patch, I want to use christmas moss instead in the areas I originally planned for the java moss.

I also picked up some seachem prime, flourish, and excel. Plan to use the flourish after weekly water changes, and the excel every other day or possibly ever day (since excel only lasts for 24 hours, if I were to dose every other day would that cause dips and spikes in my levels of available CO2? And would dosing every day be too much, maybe it would only be too much until I have more plant growth/matter?). I do not plan on injecting CO2.

My lighting right now are two MR11 2.1w 160LM 10LED 140degree (6000K), I've since ordered two MR16 4.5w 460LM 50LED 120degree (6500k) which won't be here for a month according to tracking, but I hope the lighting I have now will be sufficient and I know eventually I will have better lights.

The shrimp I plan on ordering are Neocaridina Heteropoda var. Yellow, or Yellow Shrimp. These guys seriously look awesome and I hope they really pop with my black substrate.

My water before completely rescaping was cycled and doing well. When I rescaped and added new substrate I saved about 80% of the original water, so hopefully my water stayed in check. I ordered a test kit and it should be here already, I plan on checking everything to see check my quality. Right now the temperature is 75F or roughly 24C.

This is my first attempt at a planted tank and I'm really how everything goes and and hoping for a successful tank and to have an awesome shrimp colony with beautiful plants.

Plan on adding pics in the near future.

Thanks!