Greetings from McNubbin

[McNubbin]

Hello forum. I am recently back into the hobby *cough* lifestyle *cough* after nearly a decade out. We had an old 75 gallon tank that used to house a bearded dragon. Sadly she passed about 5 years ago. We've recently moved to a house with some amount of property in central Michigan (and a heated pole barn!) and plan to be here for a couple of decades. As such I figured it was the perfect time to clean, reseal and setup the tank for fish. The attached pic is the end result. All my plants and obviously the filter are from Aquarium Coop, along with their easy green and simple iron fertilizers.

I have this tank stocked with some Boesemani Rainbows, a julidochromis transcriptus, a fleet of oto's and a featherfin syno. It's further planted with pogostemon stellatus octopus, a few banana plants, a lily bulb, a gold coin anubias that was big enough to cut into two as well as anubias nangi and the Christmas moss bridge. I had some scarlet temple in there as well, but I am thinking that the hard water caused it to melt as after about a month I had to pull it all and toss it in the compost. Bummed me out cause they were gorgeous when they arrived. The back drop in this tank is slate tiles I got from the home despot, along with some holy rock I picked up from my LFS Pruess in Lansing, and various chunks of hand chiseled granite and dark quartzsite that I have laying around my property.

I also have a 20 gallon setup in my "covid office" with another Julie that I got at the same time as the other fish hoping to get a male and female. However the bigger Julie (who is now named Dudikins) kept harassing the smaller (Jules) so I moved it up to the 20. That tank is a work in progress. And will eventually house the same Julie, maybe another dwarf cave or shell dwellers and a small school of dither fish fish of some sort.

In the future, I do have plans to expand my collection, as is the norm I think. I've been watching a good deal of Green Aqua videos and would like to set up a couple of planted competition tanks and might get into breeding. I'm also working on plans to collect rain water as well since we are on well water with a Ph of 8 to 8.2 and a gH of around 30-33°. Their are a fair number of fish I would like to keep that just won't do well in such hard, alkaline water.

Anywho, sorry for the long winded intro. I look forward to contributing and sharing with the community. 

[3vi1p3nguin]

I have water probably fairly similar to yours, gotta love Michigan wells. I ended up going RO because I wanted south Americans, and use a gH booster to bring it back up a bit. I will say though, the water is fantastic for Africans. It's tough to get things right now, but with all the time home, it's a great time to get back into it/