1st Tank - Feedback desired

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HooKooDooKu

Aquarium Advice FINatic
Joined
Feb 2, 2005
Messages
537
Location
Birmingham, AL
First attempt at an aquarium. Hadn't planned it, but DS spent $1 in tickets to "win" a 12 cent goldfish. We decided to pickup a minnow goldfish as a companion. Feedback desired. It's 10 gallons with a playsand base, Fluval 1 filtration, a few live plants and a ceramic hollow driftwood for cover, river rock for general decoration and hide air stone.
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Very nice looking tank. Is it a common goldfish?
The fish in the tank picture is the Rosie Red Minnow companion we purchased.

My best guess is that Jeffery (the carnival fish) is a Comet, just because that's what the local fish store carries. Perhaps you can tell from these poor quality images.
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Nicely done. I might suggest a taller plant for the back right corner to cover the filter. Maybe valisneria spiralis?
 
Nicely done. I might suggest a taller plant for the back right corner to cover the filter. Maybe valisneria spiralis?

Some quick research seems to indicate this plant (which is pretty I must say) needs lots of light.

But my setup has only one 15W flouresent bulb. Is that going to be enough for this grass/plant?
 
Looks good :) The comet will get larger. To large for that tank origionally but you will have quite a while before that. sorry i dont know much on the plant. :(
 
I just double checked my set up, and I have it in a 21 g with 30 w. That ratio looks OK for an attempt.
 
Here's an updated image of the tank.
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Modifications:
1. I oiled the backdrop to the back of the tank (wow what a difference).
2. Changed the air hose to a darker color and effectively glued it into the corner.
3. Turned the filter the other way around (output on top). Makes that ugly sticker really stand out. Need to either remove the sticker or move the filter to the other side.
4. Added more plants. The Villi over all doesn't look so hot. Some of it is coming along, most of it is not. Some of it didn't start very well to begin with, and I might have fertilizer burned some of it before it was added to the tank.
5. Sand bed is deeper.
6. Added a pair or ghost shrimp (you can just barely see one of them in the front right corner of the tank).
 
Well, first of all, the goldfish was grown like a weed. For starters, he is now 100% orange. All of that black you see in those fuzzy pictures are gone. All the black you can see in his tail fin are gone.

Having a little bit of a problem with diatoms. All the rock you see in the picture is covered in them. I keep getting outbreaks on the glass as well, but that's easy to rub off. The log has diatoms on it as well, but since it's brown to start with, it doesn't look so bad.

The anubus are doing great. I've already gotten a couple of new leaves. It's making for some nice dense growth over there.

I upgraded the tiny Fluval 1 to the relatively huge Fulval 2. I hate the added size, but love the added features. I planted some more vilisnera to help hide it a bit more, but the frick'n goldfish has taken to eating it. I wouldn't mind so much if he would eat all of it, but what I can't stand is when he cuts a leave in the middle and maybe eats half of what he cuts off leaving me to fish the rest floating on the top of the water.

The wisteria shown in the back left corner has already become WAY overgrown. One of them had a strong set of roots growing half way up it, so I cut it just below these new roots and planted the top half anywhere the tank had some free space.

Just last week, I added some MTS. The snails came from a local Pet Supply "Plus" that's about to dump it's fish tanks and had lots in MTS in several of the tanks. I knew it was taking a chance putting the snails in with the goldfish, but I figured it was worth a shot since he's done fine around the ghost shrimp. I became horrofied when I saw him take one of the medium size snails into his mouth. I was basically worried that he might choke on the snail. Fortunately he took it in "tail" side first, realized that wasn't food, and spit it back out. Since then I have not seem him bother any of the snails.

I brought home a few sprigs of water sprite yesterday and planted them in some open space in the tank. It looks like the goldfish ate most of one of the sprigs. Hope he leaves the other one alone.

I've been tossing these plants in where ever I could find some open space for now because I'm getting ready to upgrade to a 20 gallon long tank. The new Fluval 2 filter will be perfect for that. I'll keep the log from the existing tank. Just picked up a nice 12" piece of real drift wood and I'm currently processing that. I've already gotten some NO 30" T5 lights. It will be a total of 36 watts over the 20 gallon compared to the current 15 wats over a 10 gallon. I've also already washed a bag of pool filter sand for the substraite. The existing substrait is play sand, but it's getting everywhere, including in the filter making it more difficult to take apart and clean. The pool filter sand has significantly larger grains, so hopefully that won't be a problem. I've also fishished reinforcing the dresser the tank is on to insure it can support the weight of the 20 gallon tank. I'm left with getting the parts needed to insure this larger tank will be level and supported at all points (the 10 gallon is not) and wait for a PWC to get water levels low enough to move the existing tank to the side so I can setup the new tank it let it begin cycling. I currently have the FluVal 1 doing a fishless cycle in a bucket, so I hope that cycling the tank for a little while with the old filter, then moving the FluVal2 from the 10 gallon to the 20 gallon will allow me to effectively cycle the new tank in less than a week. While I've been going for natural looks, I've given in on one new decoration I'll use in the 20 gallon... a SMALL treasure chest that is bubble activated. Every time DS goes to the fish store with me, he always wants to play with the diver kneeling at the bubble activated treasure chest that they have a PetSmart. So I figured I needed to add something like that since the tank is in DS's bedroom. But the one at PetSmart was too huge to nicely fit in the 20 gallon tank.

I'll try to post pictures when I have it setup. In the mean time, I need to get my camera to the office where I just finished setting up a 5 gallon corner tank for a betta and a half dozen amano shrimp. But the shrimp are doing something to put out tons of little cyclindrical brown things all over the floor of the tank. I'm not sure if it's shrimp poop (if so, that's a lot of poop) or if they are pulling the underside of the drift wood apart.
 
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