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Hi and My First Planted Tank


Jeza43
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Hi

My name is Jeremy from New Zealand and I have been keeping fish since I was 16 so 19 years ago.

I usually only had 1 tank at a time and mainly had it there as something nice to look at, never did live plants.

About 1 year and a half ago i came across a Aquarium Co-Op video and enjoyed the knowledge in the video and a few more videos I caught the bug🤢.

So got a small tank and did that for a few months with the survivor fish from my 180L i had been doing to make sure I still liked it, now I have 5 set up and 2 big tanks in storage for when I move into a bigger place. I also am doing live plants in all of them now.

Picture is of my 150L (so 40 gallon ish) which is my first real go at live plants and boy what a journey lol. Started it a year ago and have been struggling with Algae until about 3 weeks ago.

It was like overnight I started noticing all the green Algae (which was all over the sides and banks and a lot of the plants) was starting to vanish and was thinking whats going on, what I have I done to achieve this? So over the year that I was doing it I was watching you tube videos and far to much Aquarium Co-Op videos gathering all the info and came across live streams talking about ways to combat Algae. So I realized Nitrate was super high as the tank was stocked with a lot of fish, mainly babies but still I was feeding them a lot, also the fertilizer I was using used a bit of nitrogen in its mix.

I then started moving the fish around to other tanks (which is why 5 tanks now , sold some to my local fish store to the level that it is then now. I started feeding less but not really by much (they just look like they always need more food 😄) but still when the fish stock numbers lowered so did how much food I was feeding. I also changed to Seachem fertilizer as the info I got was that it was low in nitrogen (we don't have all in one fertilizers that I can find in NZ, no Easy Green or anything). I even dulled my light by one strip (I have 4 LED strips) but nothing was really working, I had green Algae everywhere and I was getting frustrated until about 3 weeks ago I noticed the Algae was not building up as usual and then few days later it was actually going down. I have 2 otocinclus and mystery snails from the start so they couldn't keep up, I manged to get so ramshorn snails about 2 months ago. My substrate is full of trumpet snails also from the start and I had so many baby snails but even they have started to dwindle which means feeding is ok. So with all the helpers and changes my tank has almost no Algae, most of it is off the plants (some leaves have died when the Algae was gone), the glass only has some small spots of green spot Algae. I am now enjoying plants a lot more at the moment and am so glad I could work it out. Of course i am now to scared to change anything as everything looks great haha. Now its a wait to see if my fertilizer regime is still good and I can keep it a good balance as I still want algae for the oto's as I might have to move them to another algae riddled tank (one tank at a time lol) unless they start eating the other foods. 

Not all the plants in my tanks I like or don't like there spot but I like the crypts in the left corner the center is fake wood with Java moss on top which I love ( and so do the babies). Amazon sword in the right corner I also like. The others I am not a fan of where they are but I can move them when I get my biggest tank set up in the next 6 months hopefully.

Its been a long journey with this one but am really happy I have been learning and persevering with it.

It all started with Cory from Aquarium Co-Op so a big thank you for sharing your knowledge so we can also get joy out of this hobby😃.

 

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