Fluval Flex 15 gallon

[joe.faley]

Hello, my wife got me a 15 gallon flex as an early Xmas present and I am wondering what kind of beginner plants would be good for it?

[macdaddy36]

I like grassy plants because they cover lots of ground. Things like Vallisneria, Dwarf Sage, and Chain Sword do well and spread fast for me.

Otherwise, you can go to the Aquarium Co-op website and search under the filter 'low light' plants, as all of those will be pretty hardy. 

[nabokovfan87]

@Bentley Pascoe has one that's been in the background for his livestream for a while now with crypts!  Those worked really well for him. 

If you have a nice piece of hardscape, things like anubias, ferns, those will do well too!  Pecktec has a ton of videos with the fluval tanks and he always uses really easy plants. 🙂

[Flipper]

On 11/30/2023 at 1:51 PM, nabokovfan87 said:

has one that's been in the background for his livestream for a while now with crypts!  Those worked really well for him. 

I have a 20H and struggled with stem plants, so it's finally become an "easy as you can get" low/mid light tank with 2 kinds of Crypts and a Tiger Lily that grows non-stop.  My dwarf Pleco and Betta loves their Crypt Forest.  Crypts grow fairly slowly but it can be almost like a carpet plant in that you can form a dense mass using root tabs and some time.  I plan on adding something taller in the back corner.

[DaveO]

My crypt wendtii, dwarf sag, along with anubius barteri all outgrew my flex 15. I replaced them with shorter plants like crypt lucens, crypt parva, anubius gold coin, anubius Nana and some kind of buce I can't remember the name of. In the background I put a bit of bacopa. These are all easy plants that seem to fit the flex better.

[Revaria]

I have anubias barteri, anubias golden and java fern windelov in mine and they seem pretty bullet proof. All of them survived the initial few months, but the tiger lily and crypt wendtii wasted away over time. I believe the hood held in a lot of moisture and the flow may have affected the floating leaves of the tiger lily, so I can't recommend it; no idea what happened to the crypt though. Currently though the windelov is out of the tank as they are housing the fry in another tank, but they are quite large.

Just a heads up you can actually disassemble the pump that comes with the flex to clean out the sponge that is right behind the cap, it took me a year to realize that and I probably shaved a few years off of mine, but its been 3 years, since I set up the tank it and its still quite strong.  

[Nebraska Cornfed]

That’s awesome. I just set up a fluval flex 15 as well. I used dwarf sag, Java fern, Christmas moss, bolbitus, moss balls,and Anubius. Have some riccia floating and well.  Only planted for about 5 weeks. Seems to be doing ok. I use easy green once a week and potassium as my ferns seem to do better in my other set ups. What do you think of the light? I am Thinking maybe changing the hood and getting 12 inch coop light. 

[joe.faley]

That looks really good

[Revaria]

I really like your set up, its quite pretty for such an enclosed space and I think the light is just fine for the plants you have. I would also like to note I'm part of the if its not broke don't fix it party; unless its really really time for an upgrade. I actually had moss balls before in my fluval flex, but I got lazy with the rotating and it mostly disappeared over time. I have also messed around with riccia before and I grow plenty of christmas moss in my other tanks. Overall from my experience most of your plants should do just fine with the light as they are not high demand plants, but over time the moss and the riccia might take over everything and over shading from other plants might become a concern and if you don't realize it some species might wither away.

Edited December 2, 2023 by Revaria

[TJOBrien]

@Revaria do you have pictures of your Christmas Moss? Do you sell any or know where I can get really good type? I had some perfect stuff a few years ago and since, I have only found terrible halfbreeds of Java Moss that have random parallel branches. None that have that beautiful Christmas tree look consistently in each main branch.