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3 gallon aquaponics tank journal


Guppy Guy
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This tank has been mentioned many times in the past, so I figured it was time to create a new journal for it. It has been set up for about a year now, being used for various things. 

It is supposed to be an aquaponic tank, where you keep a betta in the tank, and grow micro greens in the top part, but me being me put, you guessed it, guppies in it. I had the micro greens growing for awhile, but they grow to fast for my liking(re planting every week fast), and the trays constantly got moldy, which I am allergic to. With the tank being in my bedroom closet 🙃, the mold wasn’t a good fit for me. I took out the trays, and put some salvinia in the top instead. It is basically a really shallow overhead sump, so the salvinia grew pretty good.

About 2 weeks later, I noticed that the water wasn’t the cleanest, so I added some duckweed in with the salvinia.

It is worth mentioning that the tanks light is a cheap amazon LED desk lamp, and it gets between 8 and 12 hours of light a day, depending on when I remember to turn it off.

About this time is where I changed out the barrel decoration that was in there first to my homemade PVC log, which is still in there today.

Somehow, I managed to kill the duckweed that was in the tank, but the salvinia survived. From there, I added a single 6-inch piece of pothos, and over the next 3 months, kept pruning it, propagating it, and trying to prevent the roots from taking over the whole tank.

Last week, I went to the local tropical plant store, and I got some neon pothos(I already had the regular pothos. The only difference is the leaf color), and put a clipping of that in the tank. It is still new, so it is tiny, but I will update later on.

That’s the plant side of the tank, so now we come to fish.

It has always had guppies in it, just for different purposes. At first, it was a breeding tank, and I found the best method for removing fry from the parents without trying. The female dropped the fry, and the fry got sucked up into the sump(unharmed because they are so small), where I grew them out, and moved them into a different tank later on. 

After awhile, I had a few fish get ich in my display tank, so I moved the breeding pair, and the tank became a quarantine tank for about 2 weeks. Then after the fish recovered from ich, the tank sat empty for about 2 weeks(this might be why the duckweed died 😅).

About that time, I had gotten some new fish to try to breed(my thumbnail pic), and put them in that tank. I never got the store fish to breed, I think it was something the fish farm did on purpose, and that fish disappeared while I was on vacation, never to be seen again.

Fast forward a few months, and we are here today. There is currently 2 females and a male that I am trying to fatten up, and I added some java moss the other day. Here are some pics:

 

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After a month or so of being empty, I have employed this tank with a new job. It is now an angelfish egg hatchery. I have a pipe that the angels laid on vertically in the tank, with an air stone on it, janksilly(Is that a work lol?) help in place with my PVC log. There is also a single guppy in the tank to keep it cycled. I don’t expect to get much the first try, but you never know 😉.

The water is cloudy in the picture because I stirred up a bunch of mulm while positioning the pipes.

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