gardenman

You might want to consider putting something like plastic needlepoint canvas over the top of the tubes and then the gravel on top of that. You want water flowing through the gravel (kind of like a fluidized bed sand filter just using bigger gravel) and without a plate of some sort you're apt to end up with water channeling down just where the tubes are with little to no flow where the tubes aren't. By creating a water filled space under the gravel there's somewhat less risk of channeling. Sealing off the upward facing holes in your tubes might encourage the tubes to pull more from the sides also. Getting that even flow of water across/through all of the substrate without there being channels is the big challenge with an undergravel filter. Most of the suction in your system will come from the area nearest the uplift tubes. It's the easiest water to move. Water will take the path of the least resistance. If the first three holes in your tubes can provide all of the water the uplift demands, the other holes farther down the tube will largely just sit there with little to no water movement. Instead of using the whole gravel bed as a biofilter you may end up just the gravel above the first inch of each tube. I've always liked the idea of the reverse-flow undergravel filters. Use the output from a good canister filter to force water up from underneath the gravel. The drawbacks of a conventional forward-flow undergravel filter is channeling. Water takes the path of least resistance and aquarium water is filled with debris. That debris gets lodged in the gravel, slowing or blocking that initial channel completely and then a new channel develops and the debris starts to accumulate there. With little to no water flow through the now blocked channel the biofiltering in that area largely stops. In your design the channels will form nearest your uplift tubes and then as they plug, the channels will move down the tubes until all are blocked. A reverse-flow system using debris free water (use a canister filter to remove the debris) largely solves that problem. There is no debris accumulating in the gravel. Anything that tries to settle in the gravel should be floated off by the current rising up from under the gravel. It should be easier to maintain a consistent flow of water through the gravel. If you've seen a fluidized bed sand filter, you're essentially doing the same thing just without moving the gravel. In the past I've seen marine tanks where an undergravel filter was siliconed onto the bottom of the tank and then a two to three inch layer of coral sand placed atop it and then a reverse-flow system used to quite literally make a fluidized sand bed inside the tank. The sand is constantly in motion and aerated in such a fashion and expands several inches in volume. It's a complicated system to get dialed in just right, but can give you enormous biofiltering volume. You just can't keep any bottom dwellers in such a tank and your filter that removes the solids is apt to suffer damage from pulling in the rogue sand crystals that get too close to the filter inlet. It is somewhat mesmerizing to watch such a sand bed in action though. Even then channeling is sometimes an issue. but it's easy to see if one part of the bed isn't moving. Fixing it can be more of a challenge but a quick stir through the non-moving section can often get it moving again.

Mine are getting another half pound of freeze-dried tubifex worms. I just ordered them yesterday.

I've got about 110 Super Red Bristlenose fry now in my little Marina hang on breeder box. They've got a piece of cholla wood, an old maple leaf, a chunk of Anubias Nana Petite that's covered in algae, some Repashy Soilent Green, canned green bean, I dropped in a couple of pieces of the TetraColor granules today for them also. When they get bigger (they're about a half inch long now) they'll get some freeze-dried tubifex worms also, but the worms are just a tick too big for them now. The Marina breeder box is on the outside of my heavily planted twenty high tank that is well established and I've got about four pond snails in the breeder box also. The box is nice in that I can circulate water through it to keep the water in the box fresh. It's moving about a teaspoon of water every second or two through the box so there's always some fresh water circulating through. That helps to eliminate any water quality issues. At this stage you can see their internal organs so you can see if they're eating and based on color, what they're eating. As to catching them in a planted tank, my older Super Reds are suckers (pardon the pun) for freeze-dried tubifex worms and get three or four cubes every afternoon. When I want to catch one or more I just put the cubes in pressed against the glass and I have my pick of ten or more plecos that are easily caught as they're distracted by the tubifex worms. The photo below shows about fourteen of the thirty or so in the big tank on or around the tubifex worms. When the worms are in the tank, you can pretty much collect the plecos by hand. They get very distracted eating the worms. They ignore the net, your hands, and everything else and focus on the worms. They love them.

Baby plecos eat a lot. It's hard to overfeed them. You always get some die off with baby fish. Some might have genetic issues. Some might get killed by tankmates. Some might lose out when competing for food. The babies when young still have their yolk sac which is pretty fragile. Their hearts are right there and somewhat exposed. Even something as small as an endler, pecking at the wrong place could kill a baby pleco pretty easily.

Food. Lots of food. Mine get green beans (about a can of them a week.) Freeze-dried tubifex worms (3-4 cubes a day in my big tank). Wardley shrimp pellets. Repashy Soilent Green. And whatever flake food manages to escape the ravenous swordtails. They're eating machines. I put a handful of green beans in about a half hour ago, and they're gone!

They're a really neat little fish. I highly recommend them. That's four of the thirty-some that are in my fifty gallon tank. I've got a hundred-plus week old fry in a breeder box also. These guys breed remarkably true to form. I got my original seven through catfishtown on eBay. They originals were only about an inch long when I got them in August of 2019, but they've done very well.

I have caves made of PVC pipe with end caps (1" diameter and 1.5" diameter) about six inches long. Mine breed most readily in the 1" diameter pipes even though they barely fit in them. Oddly enough the one they breed in the most is the one at the left front corner of the tank where there's near constant activity passing by. The secluded caves in the back parts of the tank are largely ignored. Here's a photo of one of my males in the one inch diameter tube.

Fifty is on the lower end of the normal scale for a big female guppy. A mature adult female guppy can have 200 at a time, but 100 is more the norm. They can spawn every 28 days (or so.) They typically start spawning ((small spawns) at around three months of age and live for about three years. Everything pretty much eats baby guppies, including mama guppy, so you almost never get a full-sized spawn unless you take extreme measures and isolate mama guppy and protect the babies from her. And truth be told, the world would be knee deep in guppies if they weren't eaten. If you have an average female who gives you 100 babies each month and those babies all start popping out a hundred babies each month when they're three months old, the numbers start to get pretty ridiculous, pretty quickly. Unless you know what to do with around two million guppies at the end of the first year, it's a good thing the other fish eat baby guppies.

Baffles are used to direct the water, but they don't have to be perfectly watertight, just strong enough to direct the water where you want it to go. That gives you some leeway in what to use. Glass and acrylic are the "normal" things to use. They're cheap and relatively easy to work with. In theory you could use bricks, or other block-type material to create baffles also. (Just be careful that what you use doesn't adversely affect your ph. What you're trying to create with baffles is a path for the water to travel that optimizes contact with your biofiltering material. A typical set of baffles would have water coming in at one side, going through a mechanical filter media (socks typically) then down and under the first baffle and up through the first set of biofiltering material before overflowing the next baffle and down to a pump. (additional chambers can be added as needed.) Water tends to choose the path of least resistance though so very often the actual water movement will just be through a small part of your biofiltering material. The best way to overcome that is to use a fluidized bed type of biofilter using something like the K1 bio media and a powerful air pump to keep it circulating in the biofiltering chamber. Off the Deep End Aquatics on YouTube has a nice above tank sump with a fluidized bed section on one of his plywood tank builds housing his Arowanas and rays. His is above the tank rather than below the tank but it gives you a nice idea of how one should work.

The cholla wood is very popular with the fry. It's been in the breeder box about two hours and it's stuffed full of baby plecos.

It's a biofilm. Some plecos, otos, snails, shrimp, etc., view it as food and will devour it. If you don't want any of those in your tank than chemical means are your only real option, but even then the film is likely to recur. Driftwood is an organic material and will breakdown in water and attract bacteria/fungi which will then create a fresh biofilm.

Could you build a tank stand out of 2X2's? Yes, but the challenge is in the construction. There's very little mass of wood to work with. Conventional construction techniques like lap joints, mortise and tenon joints, doweled joints, etc. are more difficult and less strong when dealing with smaller pieces of wood. Fasteners have less wood to get a grip on. Adhesives work okay, but once again with less surface area, there's less strength. One of the big concerns would be the stand wracking. If you bump into the end of a stand made entirely of 2X2's there's a very much higher risk of the whole thing collapsing. You could help counter that with a plywood back or cross bracing but that's complicating the construction more and requiring more materials. There's a company called Framingtech.com that makes aluminum stands using extruded aluminum. They're absurdly expensive ($547 for a 40 breeder size) but are sleeker and cleaner than a 2X4 stand. Imagitarium makes an all metal stand for 40 breeders that's currently $64 at Petco. When you're looking at 2X2X8's that are listed at $10.72 each and start adding up how many you'd need, that $64 starts to look pretty good. If you absolutely must build one yourself and you want a sleek and cleaner looking stand that won't collapse and you're not the type to move the tank around, you could use the wall of the house to support the back of the tank by securely (very securely) mounting a 2X2 cleat to the wall of the house (definitely hit at least two studs) then use some 3/4" plywood (or something comparable) attached to the wall cleat extending out with a simple pair of legs under the front of the plywood to hold it up. You'd want the back of the tank as close to the wall cleat as possible and you'd want the legs to be nice and strong, but a wall supported tank could work. There's going to be a lot of shear stress on the fasteners used to secure the stand to the wall, so you'll want to avoid fasteners with low sheer strength (like drywall screws) and use something more like a lag bolt that's built for sheer loads. Joey, the King of DIY on YouTube mounted his 120 gallon tanks in a similar fashion.

The big issue with drilling a tank is you don't absolutely know if a tank is made of tempered glass or not until you try cutting the hole. Then you can find out the hard way that it was.

I'll probably try trading them with a few local fish stores. I bought mine on eBay through a seller called catfishtown in August 2019. They were three for $19.99 and he had a buy one pack get one free sale, so I got six (seven actually as he threw in a spare) for around $35 after shipping costs. They spawned for the first time in April 2020 (or so). They had around twenty babies in that first spawn and they've been spawning off and on ever since. I typically just leave the eggs and fry in the big tank and let whoever survives survive. Papa pleco kicked these eggs out for some reason, so I scooped them up and moved them to the breeder box. It'll take about four to six months to reach a tradeable size, but then I'll see who offers what in local fish stores. I've got about thirty now in my big tank and most of them are two to three inches long. They're a very neat little fish.

The very neat and highly maintained planted tanks are pretty, but in the real world, my tanks turn into a jungle pretty quickly. I like jungles though so it works out well for me.

In the case of the twenty gallon tank, you should be fine. Bacteria live all through your tank, not just in the gravel. The two sponges should house more than enough bacteria for six Corys. (Just a note, Corys and crawfish don't always do well together.) The fifteen gallon is a little trickier. For light stocking I would think you'd be okay. I'd keep an eye on the level though. If you see ammonia starting to spike, then moving your sponge filter to the fifteen gallon tank for a bit should help with that. I wouldn't throw a lot of fish in the fifteen right away, but with light stocking you should be okay.

The babies are all taking advantage of the slate cave this morning and that made counting a tad easier. The photos below show the horde as shot and then the next one with the black dots indicate each individual fish as I counted them for a total of 108 baby Super Red Bristlenose Plecos. That's more than I'd thought. They're starting to eat real food now so the feeding will have to keep pace with their appetites.

How does the fish look from a top down view? The profile shots in your photo aren't that unusual for a Cory. They all tend to slope up from the head to the base of the dorsal fin then slope down to the tail. There may be a bit of a deformity towards the lower end of the dorsal fin area, but it's not horrible. Spinal deformities are typically more apparent in a top down view of the fish. If the body is straight from a top down view and not "S" shaped, then this probably isn't a spinal deformity. There's a lot of muscle structure around fins and the hump towards the back of the dorsal fin could just be because you've got an Arnold Schwarzenegger of the Cory world with overly developed back muscles to control his dorsal fin. A top down view would tell you more.

A center standpipe could be a weir. Think of a weir as a dam. It's typically glued in and sealed so water can only get in from the top. That way if a connection under the tank fails, only a bit of water comes out instead of the whole tank.

Pothos could do the job with just their roots in the water. Floating plants would have some benefits as well as drawbacks in your tank. They grow fast. They won't compete for the carbon dioxide in the water column as they'll pull all they need from the air. They're easy to remove as they overgrow the tank. They're cheap. And they're pretty tough little plants. The chief drawback is they'll block the light from your planted plants. I'd probably try to focus on larger floating plants to remove nitrates. If you weigh a water hyacinth that covers a square foot of the tank and duckweed that covers a square foot of the tank the water hyacinth would likely weigh a lot more. Why is this important? A lot of a typical water hyacinth's growth is above the water. It's a bigger, bulkier plant that would therefore have more plant that needs to be fed. Nitrates in your water is its food. A square foot of water hyachinth or water lettuce should therefore consumer more nitrates than a square foot of something smaller that sits only on the water surface. (Or so I'm assuming.) If you opt for a floating plat the bigger ones like water hyacinths and water lettuce would be my recommendations. They're far easier to control than duckweed and they have more mass to absorb more nitrates. I'll add a photo of a water hyacinth and it's three babies below. It's adrift in the sea of duckweed in my thirty high. A big plant is far easier to weed out than lots of little ones. (I have modified an Odyssea Clean 100 Surface Skimmer to vacuum up duckweed however and it works pretty well. Just enlarge the openings on the three sides of the skimmer cut to accept duckweed and you've got a duckweed vacuum cleaner.)

That Wyze Pan Cam is a pretty neat gadget. Under $40 too. It's hard to beat. The problem with testing something like a smart plug on one tank is you get into the one tank mindset. It worked for the lights on on one tank and I have four, so I bought three more plugs. I even got them all up and working well for months before realizing I could have done it all with just one smart plug and a power strip. Oh well, I'll have some spare smart plugs once I swap everything out.

I'm 62 years old and have been keeping fish since I was six or so, and I've never heard of anyone drilling holes in the bottom of a tank for an undergravel filter. The older style of overflows with the internal weir used to have bottom holes, but that's about the only time I ever saw holes drilled in the bottom of a tank. The weir would, in theory anyway, prevent the whole tank from draining should there be an issue with the bottom seal on the hole. The water would drop to the top of the weir and stabilize there. Drilling a hole into the bottom of the tank without a weir to stop a flood is pretty risky stuff. For those who don't know the weir is like a dam with a screen or gated opening at the top to allow water in. That area behind the weir stays dry until water reaches the inlets at the top of the weir. Should there be an issue, water would only drain down to the opening at the top of the weir and then stop, preventing the whole tank from draining. There were corner weirs (the most common), back weirs, and even center weirs on bigger tanks. A hole in the bottom of a tank without a weir is a recipe for disaster.

I love the smart plugs. I bought one as an experiment and liked it so much I put one on all of my lights. What I didn't figure out was that I should have just bought one and plugged all of my lights into a single power strip and use the one smart plug to control the whole power strip. So, I've got four smart plugs doing the job one could do. After the holidays I'll redo everything and switch it over to just one smart plug controlling the lights. I've also got a Wyze Pan Cam so I can keep an eye on my tanks when I'm not there. I can look left, right, up or down and zoom in using the cam. It's very handy. I can be on my phone anywhere in the world and as long as I have a connection, see how my tanks are doing. A new Wyze cam will be coming in January that will not be the panning type but a fixed view one that'll go on my bedroom tank so I can keep an eye on that also. The Wyze cams will even send me an alert if my smoke alarm goes off. Handy!

Here's a not so great photo from yesterday showing the babies in the remodeled breeder box. They're piled up four and five deep in the right front corner of the box, but you can see eight on the slate. Over the next few days the yolk sacs should disappear completely and they'll become eating machines. The tank water is now going into the box at a slow pace of about a teaspoon per second. (Measured by holding a teaspoon under the outlet of the breeder box.) That's decent water flow, but not too crazy. This is the Marina breeder box by the way. Amazon now sells an Ista box that looks the same. Finnex makes a similar box but theirs has a pump to move the water which would probably move too much water too fast for many baby fish. The baby plecos might be okay but other fry would have a hard time.

I would prefer to never drill the bottom of a tank. When something goes wrong in such a situation, the whole tank drains. There are easier ways to hide airline tubing. You can simply silicone it into a back corner and then run it along the back bottom of the aquarium and even include elbow and tee fittings with short airline tubing stubs with plastic air valves to feed current, and future needs. All of the stuff along the back wall can be siliconed in place and buried in the gravel. Someone would really need to search to figure out how you got air down there. It's easier to hide the airline tubing than the sponge filter. You can buy all kinds of airline tubing fittings these days. Two ninety degree plastic elbows, one to turn the airline from vertical to horizontal at the corner where it's glued in and the other at the far end with an airline tubing stub and valve. However many tees and valves you might want for future expansion, one every eight to twelve inches seems about right. All of that except for the tubing coming down in the corner could be hidden under the substrate and invisible. Need to add an airstone later? You know where the available stubs are, simply dig through the substrate, find the valve, open it to blow out any substrate, close it, attach the airline tubing to the airstone, adjust the airflow using the valve, cover everything back up with the substrate. Boom! You've got invisible air wherever you want/need it.