We haven’t been blogging about our aquarium for a few years now; the last such post about our tank at home was nearly three years ago now. The three feet tank still graces our living room, and it was put up five years ago when we first moved to our home here.
The way I’ve set it up from the start is that it mostly runs on auto-mode. Basically, apart from the daily critter feeds and a fortnightly partial change of water, the only other maintenance routines is the about bimonthly cleaning of filter inlets, trimming of plants, and scrubbing of fish-tank waters.
The two major changes since that last post has been removal of a costly CO2 injection system that I added when first setting the tank up (the system was too cumbersome and controlling the flow of the gas for optimal plant growth was too difficult), and adding a second aquarium filter to the tank. One of those dreadfully expensive but highly-regarded made-in-Germay Eheim filters.
The tank has also, remarkably, stabilized very well for the last three years now. We rarely have critter deaths. The last non-natural critter death as I recall it was one tetra that inexplicably took a leap out of the tank two years ago.
We haven’t been replacing the critters though. I had this big idea about replacing the entire substrate layer a year ago (a major and very time-consuming operation for those of us who know about the hobby). The substrate the current tank uses is aquatic soil, and it has a finite life-span; slowly turning into slush. I picked up nearly 30 kilograms of inert replacement gravel, but haven’t quite got round to actually doing it! Oh well; maybe at the end of this year.
Ling was asking about our longest lived critter. It’s this little bugger:
He’s an Albino corydoras. We’ve had him for 4.5 years now. He grew from a little runt of about 2/3rds of an inch, to a grand size of nearly 1.5 inches now.=)
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