Substrate change, now with LOTS O PICS =P

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grimlock3000

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After much debate, my fish are getting a full substrate change today. I am going to go from Este's Ultra Pearl rocks to smaller Este's Ultrastone gravel. The Ultra Pearl looked decent, but the rocks are so big it was trapping all kinds of food and waste before a filter had a chance to get to it. I recently swapped the substrate in my 10g and was happy with the result, it is much easier to clean now and the filter catches more waste. The tank looked like this before (like three months ago):

tank.jpg


Substrate close up:

ram.jpg


Will post more pics as I progress...
 
Neat tank. :D I'm curious to see the new substrate.

There's a part of me crying out to make a comment about the knitting/crochet basket, but I shall resist!
 
The basket is totally not mine! :)

I am going cheesy with the new substrate, black with a bit of purple in it :mrgreen:
 
Cool substrate...kind of pearly and shimmery. Is it doing better at not trapping all the food so quickly?
 
Oops...I just re-read this and realized the pix are of the substrate you are going to change :roll: (This is what happens when I go on this forum while on major allergy medicine...)

Ok, will wait for the pix of the new substrate... :)

P.S. There's nothing wrong with knitting or crocheting, you have nothing to be embarassed about, heehee :wink:
 
Sure Sure. That's why the basket is located conveniently next to the aquarium. :D
 
Here is my tank after I took the plants out. None of the fish really seemed to mind...

redo1.jpg


...except for the Pleco who was hiding under my bunch of Java Moss like his life depended on it:

redo2.jpg


The fish did not mind when the rocks were out either:

redo3.jpg


My larger Ram was happy as ever, it was having a grand old time picking through the waste on the bottom looking for food, it colored up very nicely:

redo4.jpg


I put everything back in, the plants are looking pretty dirty. The plants quickly faded and lost their color after purchase so basically I wasted $25 on them. I will be buying new plants soon. I am going to go with green silk plants and go for a totally different look. When everything went back in the tank, I kept it all in about the same place as before:

redo5.jpg


A pic of the whole area, including the basket in question :p:

redo6.jpg


Here is a cave I made for the tank:

cave1.jpg


Another shot of the cave, its just PVC pipe, I used All-Glass Silicone to hold the rocks on. It needs to wait about a week before I put it in the tank just to make extra certain the silicone is cured:

cave2.jpg
 
Very cool! I must say the black/purple combo is very disco-y, which I like :mrgreen:

How did you glue the rocks onto the PVC cave? Did you coat it completely in the silicone and then roll it around in the rocks?
 
To make the cave, I put silicone all over the pipe and smeared it around with rubber gloves. Then I put the PVC in a plastic bag filled with the rocks and rolled it around. It was mostly covered after that, but the rolling process wiped some of the silicone off, so I put it on a styrofoam plate and started adding more silicone and putting on more rocks. I made an incredible mess doing this because some of the existing rocks fall off and then I had silicone covered rocks all over my desk, then I decided to wait a bit. After an hour or so, it is MUCH easier to work with the silicone because you can handle the PVC without making such a mess and having everything fall off. Then I finished it off by putting dabs of silicone on the blank areas of the top and poking some rocks on it. Waited another hour, flipped it over, and did the bottom of the cave the same way.
 
Wow, what a project! Thanks for posting the entire process. I started a mini cycle one time when I did the very same thing you did, because the gravel I had was just a bit too big. That tank had a biowheel on it, but it crashed anyway. I ran to the LFS and got a packet of Bio-Spira and all was well.

Beautiful ram! I wonder if he could see his reflection in the tank bottom, and that is why he colored up? Really nice fish.

I am not going to say anything about the knitting basket, I think we have been through this once before when you posted that pic! :wink:
 
I kept checking for a bio crash last night and this morning, never had any ammonia or nitrites so far. I am hoping the canister filter can pull the tank through. I did the same method I listed for my 10g tank, this time I also cut back the feedings for the week before to reduce the ammount of waste:

http://www.aquariumadvice.com/viewtopic.php?t=21094

I think the Ram was especially happy because he was finding some Nematodes wiggling around on the bottom of the tank. I thought I cleared all of those up a while ago, but the Ram was not going to pass up a chance at live food. There just is no place for a Nematode to hide on a glass bottom tank with a hungry Ram on patrol :mrgreen:
 
Since you have the darker gravel have you noticed your fish becoming a little more colorful?
I have seen posts saying if you make your gravel darker, the fish feel safer to show their full colors. I started out with almost white gravel and was wondering why my fish were so pale... :roll: But now I have added darker to the mix, and am planning to add more very soon. My neons are more colorfull and my dwarf gourami is positively vibrant. :)
 
My Rams are more colorful more of the time, so that is good thing. With the other substrate, sometimes I would look into the tank and the Rams would be extremely bland in color while swimming around. Over the last few days whenever I look in the tank the Rams have good color showing. The remaining fish look about the same, but they stand out a lot more with the darker gravel in the tank.

Gravel vacuuming was a treat as well. With my larger rocks, I could barely get the siphon to the bottom of the tank cuz it would get stuck on rocks. Then it would pick up big chunks of waste and leftover food that the fish could not get to. Then my tank would get cloudy for a while as I disturbed the waste and it spread around. My filters would not collect must waste because the rocks trapped it all. With the smaller gravel, it is MUCH easier to vacuum. I can just sift around in gravel easily and pick up waste here and there. My filters catch more of the waste as well, since it sits on top of the rocks and floats around a bit instead of immediately getting trapped.

Previously, the tank would light up the whole room whenever it was on because the rocks reflected so much light, and that sucked too for watching movies and playing video games. I would have swapped out the substrate a long time ago if I knew how much of a difference it would make :)

Something else I changed that worked well was adding two more intake strainer extensions to get the AquaClear intake lower into the tank. Now I have the problem that the waste goes through four intake strainers on the way to the filter, so the strainers can get clogged up with bits of Java Moss floating around. I suppose that is better than having to clean the gunk off the impeller though. I might cut off the strainers on each of the tubes, hrmm...
 
Here is something interesting, this is what the 26g used to look like when I first set it up:

original.jpg
 
I think I would cut off the strainer part from the interior sections of the extensions - that sounds like a pain. Maybe swap out the one on the very end for an AC sponge and that will catch any piece of java moss without it ever going into the filter.

Darker gravel definitely has a positive effect on fish coloration, except when I put black mollies in a tank with black sand - couldn't see the fish, LOL!

I had my kribs in a sand tank and their color was pitiful - I thought something was wrong with them. I then had the idea to put dark substrate in there and voila - bright colorful kribbies! They obviously felt more secure, and even my non-fishy friends noticed the difference.
 
I tried using an AC sponge for a prefilter for a couple weeks but all that did was catch waste in the sponge instead of making it into the filter :p I might try it again though if my impeller gets jammed up.

I cut out the three extra strainers and noticed a moderate increase in the flow rate of my filter, so that worked out well. I used some flush cutters I have for my RC cars so it was a simple process of snipping away where the strainer meets the pipe.

While redoing the intake, I notice the media in the AC was popping up a bit. I push it down, it popped back up. Pushed it down again, popped out again. Then I pulled it out entirely. The filter floss between the sponges was so packed with waste collected from when I ripped up the substrate, water could barely get through. I put a new layer of floss in, and WHOOSH, my flowrate almost doubled :)
 
Cool. I know what you mean about the AC sponge - it is almost like it becomes your filter, LOL! I use them on my sand tanks to protect the filter motor and they have to be rinsed out frequently.
 
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