Aquascape Update – The First Week

by Alan Cole · Saturday, April 18th, 2015

Things seem OK in the new fish tank and the Aquascaping experiment continues. The pump that pumps water up over the top of the LED’s is a little bit noisier than I would like but other than that the hardware seems OK and less than a week after flooding things seems to have settled down a little. I did a fairly large water change today so here are some shots straight after that.

Full Tank Shot

The plants are growing well and the stem plants that I added last week are settling in already and showing considerable signs of growth too.

: Anubius and Hydrocotle

: Left Hand Slope

: Right Hand Slope

The carpeting plants seem happy enough in their new submerged state as well.

: Algae on Rocks

: Echinodorus tenenllus

: Pogostemon

: Right hand slope

There are some signs of algae already though on the rocks, on the pebbles, along the bottom of the glass and even on the filter box.

Algae on Rocks

I’m going to reduce the photoperiod and split it into two periods. Hopefully this will subdue the algal growth and it will also mean that the lights are on when we’re in the house rather than when we are at work so that we can at least see it. I’ve set the lights to come on at 6:30-8:00am and then again from 5:30-9:00pm. That’s only 5 hours in total so I will increase that gradually as I get on top of the algae, but hopefully it’ll be enough to stop it in its tracks without affecting the health of the plants.