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Day 0: The decision has been made; were going to get an aquarium. After first trying to get a second hand tank and finding that the ones available were mostly old tanks in horrible condition, we have now decided to go for a new one. The approximate size will be 120 x 40 x 50 cm. This evening we visited several Aquarium shops and finally ended up at Helsingin Akvaariokeskus. This shop was completely stuffed with aquaria of different sizes and had lots of fish and plants. The shop is owned by a couple with a little baby which was happily strolling through the shop. Both the man and woman were very friendly, but unfortunately their English wasnt very good. Luckily my wife could translate all my questions and gave some nice information about a Juwel 240 aquarium that we were interested in.

The Juwel 240 aquarium is a series of aquaria (240 liters; 121 x 41 x 55 cm) that come with a stand, lights, hood, heater and an inside filter. I asked whether he could remove the filter since I have one myself and was told that he always removes them because they dont really work. Since I didnt want the filter I got a 30 discount, which was nice. I also bought fertilized soil for the plants, black basalt, some chemicals for the first water treatment, a net and a thermometer to get started. All came with a nice discount so in general we were about 100 cheaper off than at another store we were earlier during the day, not bad at all. This was all just before the Easter weekend, so delivery would only be the next week.

I wouldn't put a male betta in a community tank that wasn't specifically tailored to his needs. I have heard of rosy barbs being rather nippy, so I wouldn't do it.

I would get one more cory so you would have a school .

Congrats on the baby!

---

They shade the glow of it with their mossy-misty costumes,
They wear masks of silk, porcelain, brass, and silver,
So as not to mislead with their own, ordinary faces.

Day 26: The tank is going great, the mollies and otos have pretty much eradicated the algea from the tank, only some small spots on the background remain and those actually don't look too bad, giving it a little bit more a natural look. Yesterday I increased the group of rummy-nose tetras to ten, now they form a really nice school of fish, flocking like birds almost

This morning me and my wife went to the LFS where I bought the tank, wanting to buy some Angelfish. I ended up buying cories and rosy tetras, the angelfish they had were only of the wildtype form and didn't look extremely happy. That LFS has a huge selection of cories and in the end I had my wife decide which ones she liked best and took those (5 of them). I just had a hard time finding out which specific subspecies of Corydoras it was. The owner of the LFS told me he got them as leopard cories, but that it wasn't that particular one. I found a nice site where they have photos of pretty much any kind of catfish and managed to identify mine as Corydoras cf. copei. Here is that site, if you're interested:
http://www.planetcatfish.com/core/index.htm

The rosy tetras were impressing my wife as well, and were pretty much the only "colorful" fish that I dared to put in the tank (most of the colorful ones were Cichlids and I'm not intending to have my tank turned into a sandbox), and I ended up buying 6 of those. The angelfish are now on hold for a while, my budget for the aquarium has been spent for the next two months at least

BTW, does anyone know whether Bettas attack rosy tetras? My wife would really like a betta male in the tank, but Since the rosy tetras have somewhat long fins I'm afraid it would end up in a fight.

Day 23: Another little update, as you may (or may not) have noticed in my signature I now have 3 black mollies and 2 otos in my tank. They arrived a little bit sooner than I had planned, mostly because in a matter of three days the tank was having a LOT of algea growth. There were three different kinds of algea that I could distinguish: 1) a thin coating of reddish algea, which was growing pretty much everywhere, 2) a couple of small tufts of very dark green hairy algea, and 3) some light green stringy algea that could make stretches of several inches long.

The plants in the tank are growing pretty nicely, so I expected that the algea would disappear in the near future anyway, but since the reddish stuff was growing real fast (and I don't think light is really the problem since it also grows very near the surface), I decided that I better do something about it while my plants aren't suffering yet. So I went to my LFS and bought the three Black mollies and the two Otos. And those mollies meant business! As soon as they were released they started eating the algea, all the three different kinds. The Otos didn't quite start straight away, but they also seem to do their thing now The next day all the plants were clean, spotless! Just amazing, only the background and some small spots here and there were just a bit tainted. Needless to say that I'm very happy with these little fish... and if I don't add any other fish I'm afraid I'll end up with a school of mollies soon, the one male of the three was trying very hard to impregnate one of the two females (which by her size actually already may be pregnant).

[span class="edited"][Edited by 2004-05-12 02:41][/span]

Day 20: I'm going to become a father! This morning I saw the unrefutable evidence when my wife showed it to me: A BFP (or Big Fat Positive, as all the women call it). In Januari next year my normal life will officially end and will I have to learn to live with 2 hours sleep each night I'm very excited!

In other - more aquarium related - news, the 6 remaining rummy-nose tetras are doing fine, they're very active little fish and must have swum up and down the tank several thousands of times now. Today I'm going to get two black mollies which now will have some nice feeding grounds on some algea that are slowly starting to appear. In previous tanks that I had the black mollies always were very fond of the stringy type of algea and that's the one I start to see now.

One problem I see coming is this summer. The past few days temperatures here have been quite high (near 30 degrees celcius in the sun) and that lead to some uncomfortable high temperatures in the tank (also near 30). I think part of the problem is that the lights are about half an inch away from the water, adding heat to it. The heating element I have in the tank is at its lowest setting, so basically it's off. I may have to add a fan to the cover in order to clear the hot air. At least last night it was nice and cool so the water temp dropped back to about 25 degrees Celsius.

I'll keep you posted.

It was probably the stress of moving. As you said, those fish aren't the most hardy for a new tank

Day 17: The first fish are in the tank yesterday evening I went to a local LFS to take a peek at their collection, and it looked all pretty good. The owner of the LFS was a very helpful (overly so almost) old woman who was asking all kinds of questions about my tank, trying to figure out whether it was cycled and such. So in order to make sure it would be safe for the fish I bought a 5-in-1 test kit (horribly expensive btw: 30) to find out about my water quality. Here are the results:
NO3-: ~10
NO2-: 0
GH: 3-6
KH: 3-6
pH: ~7.0

Pretty nice values for a week old tank if I say so myself. Having these results in my pocket I went back to the LFS and bought 7 Hemigrammus bleheri or rummy-nose tetra. These fish are lovely school swimmers and stay very close together. Once I was back at home I found out that this species is actually a very sensitive fish, so maybe not such a great choise a first fish in the tank. Also I then noticed that two of the seven had somewhat whitish spots and I was instantly alarmed, the last thing I need is a disease straight when I put the first fish in the tank. Closer observation however showed that it wasn't directly a disease, but that the LFS saleswoman (who had a horrible time catching these guys) had managed to damage them with the catching net. Still slightly worried I released them after floating them in the tank for about an hour during which I added a bit of aquarium water to the bag every ten minutes. After release they first hid bedtween the plants straight awayu, having nearly no color at all, but within an hour the noses were nice bright red and they were swimming out in the open, the males even chasing the three females in the group. It looked good.

This morning when I woke the fist thing I did was check on the fish and found that one of the females had died, I have no idea why, she wasn't one of the damaged ones and the others seem perfectly fine, very active and eating nicely. I took out the dead one and will monitor the others, hopefully this was the only death.

Day 10: Again it's been some time since the last write-up. In the past week I've been mostly waiting for the substrate, it's been quite annoying. When I bought the tank my LFS manager told me he'd get the rest of the substrate in 2 - 3 days (I got 20 kg out of the 40 I paid for). Those 2 - 3 days turned out to become 2 weeks and then I decided to switch to a different substrate, in stead of matte black basalt split, I now have some shiny black stuff. That is, it's shiny when it's dry, once it is wet it doesn't look shiny anymore, which I am quite glad about.

Anyway, so two days ago I finally had the substrate and could start with the decoration of the tank... kind of I first added a layer of TetraPlant Complete substrate in the tank so that my plants will have something to eat. Then I started washing the black substrate, that was one thing I learned from my grandfather about 20 years ago: whenever you buy new substrate, first wash it by putting it in a bucket, fill it half full with water and mix, wash away the dirty water and repeat until the water stays clear. It's funny, on those substrate packages it often says it has been treated in such a away you can use it in your tank straight away, but if you do you end up with some horrible murky soup. Also this time I was happy with that little bit of advice, the first bucket of water came off like mud.

Before I could actually start adding the substrate I needed some rocks to build some terraces in the tank, I had collected some rocks from the neighborhood, tested them with vinegar, baked them in the oven and was ready to use them, but my wife had seen lava rock in the LFS. And so we headed to the LFS to get lava rock, because "these horrible rocks you have just won't do!" I bought 5 big lava rocks of which I hammered two into smaller pieces with a screwdriver and a hammer, washed them off and build some nice elevated areas in the tank, then put the bogwood in the tank and started adding the substrate. There's now about 6-7 inches substrate height difference between the front and the back of the tank, which gives a nice dept to the tank, the bogwood looks fantastic! Then it was time to put in the plants, here's the species that I managed to get my hands on:

Lobelia cardinalis
Hydrocotyle verticillata
Cryptocoryne willisii
Alternanthera reineckii "roseafolia"
Anubias barteri var. nana
Lileaopsis brasiliensis
Hygrophila corymbosa "Siamensis"
Echinodous "Rose"
Ceratopteris thalictroides
Microsorum pteropus "Undolata"

They're now in the tank, looking quite nice though they still need a lot of growing. I'd still love to have Rotala indica and another low plant that I forgot the name of, but right now my budget is a bit low. It's now waiting until they start settling nicely before adding any fish.

Today I'm still going to install the filter and add some chemicals to get the cycle started. I'm going to run the filter with active carbon for the first 2 - 3 months or so since I'm not quite sure whether the background has now become completely "inactive", the carbon should take care of any impurities that can still "leak out". Regular water changes should also help. Tonight I'll take some first photos.

Day 9: Well actually it's not really day 9, but more like day 13 or so, but to keep this a bit comprehensive I'll just keep posting this as if they are successive days.

In the past few days I've finished work on the background. After seeing all the white spots on it the other day I spent another 1 hours with a tiny brush dotting out the remaining white spots. Here the problem was mostly the carbon issue, it needed serious brushing in order to have it released into the paint, similar as to what I wrote on day 7. Then it was back to drying the thing for another 24 hours. The next day it looked pretty good, but it had a couple of sticky spots where I think the compounds of the paint did not quite mix as well as they should have (probably caused by the paint being so old )

I washed down the three parts of the background in the shower, then let them dry on the balcony for 2-3 hours and started with glueing them into the tank. I was a bit apprehensive about the glueing part since it means that taking them out is going to be a pain, but neither do I want to end up with the entire thing coming out of the substrate and floating in the tank, so in the end I decided to glue the whole thing in.

The glueing was done with aquarium grade silicone kit (be careful when you buy kit that it doesn't contain any anti-fungal poison, it'll kill your fish), and done over two days. I first glued in the left side part and braced it in place with some sticks with socks on both ends (to avoid damaging the styrofoam and the glass) I let that dry overnight and glued the second and third parts only the next day since I didn't have enough braces and I wasn't sure how much force I could put on the glass of the tank.

I let that also dry for 24 hours before removing the braces. Then it was time to fill the tank for the first time All in all it took 1 hour and 20 minutes to fill it up to capacity, but it looked great! I took some photos and now the film is full, so I'll have it developed in the next few days and will put links to the photos. I have the first water in for 24 hours now and will have it for another 24 before draining the tank, this is to leech all the epoxy chemicals that did not polymerize out of the background... it seems to work since the "sticky" spots I mentioned earlier have now dissolved and left some white spots of clean styrofoam *sigh*

more news will follow soon. This weekend I'm gonna put in the substrate, start up the filter and maybe put in some plants.

Sounds quite amazing so far, and you haven't even mentioned whats going into the tank. Keep us updated, I love reading about other peoples projects.

Thanks, I indeed haven't mentioned what exactly will be in the tanks, mostly because I ahevn't completely decided yet. I know I want a couple of Angelfish and probably some Diamond Gouramis (or is it pearl in english), the ones witht all the little black spots, red chest and pearl base . Besides those I don't know yet, maybe some Rasbora Hetermorpha in a little school, a couple of cories and possibly something else... we'll see. First I have to get the tank in working order, so the first fish are still a couple of weeks away.

Day 8: This morning after breakfast I took a look at the now almost black background. The paint had dried an even darker color than it was when it was wet, pretty good looking actually. I did see some small white spots where the paint hadn't cought properly, all about the size of a single styrofoam cell. I thought I would be able to get away with it.

So I placed the thing in the tank and took a photo, my film is now almost full so I think I'll have it developed next week, so expect some pictures in about a week or so. To be honest, it looked pretty damn good. Then I took the couple of pieces of bogwood that had been soaking for the past few days and also put them in the tank. Somehow when I bought them I thought they were kinda small, but in the tank they look a bit too big, I think I'll leave one of them out, the same counts for the rocks I found yesterday, I had a couple which I thought were way too small and now it turns out they are the ones which are more or less perfect in size... the aquarium in my mind is a lot bigger than the one in reality

So the background was in, the wood was there, time to put water in the tank for the first time! I was quite excited and then a bit worried, I have a 40 liter bucket (10.4 g) but where could I place it in order to have it higher than the tank. I didn't dare to put the thing on top of the tank and finally ended up making a mount out of two kitchen chairs (with high backs) and some wood, which was able to support my weight, so the 40 kg of the bucket should be fine in theroy. It wasn't all that stable though so I only filled the bucket half full.

When I had the tank for about one third full I noticed that the background was trying very hard to start floating, so I made a mental note that I really will have to glue it to the rear glass with silicone kit when I think it's ready. For now I used the bogwood to keep it in place. Then I took a good look at the part which was now underwater. My heart sank when I realized that I had forgotten about the magnifying properies of water and glass, anything in water behind glass looks about one third bigger than it actually is (that's why divers always claim to have seen huge fish when in fact it was a minnow or something). The problem it gave me was that the tiny white spots were now very much visible underwater. So I decided not to continue filling the tank, and in stead drained it. The background pieces are now drying in the sun and I'll paint the spots with a small brush in a little while.

Sounds quite amazing so far, and you haven't even mentioned whats going into the tank. Keep us updated, I love reading about other peoples projects.

Mike

Day 7: After rounding off the edges of the background and removing more material to make it a bit thinner I started preparing the paint. As I mentioned before the paint is a marine grade epoxy paint which has a stone grey color, In order to make it a darker paint I bought some carbon powder that I want to mix with it.

When I opened the cans I noticed that the compounds had settled into fairly solid clumps on the bottom of the cans, a quick check on the side of the cans and then I saw the year 1993, so it seems that the paint is 11 years old I hope it still works the way it should. The base material was easy to liquefy, but the other part took a long time, and even then it wasnt entirely as runny as I would have liked. I mixed them together according to the instructions and mixed some more. It seemed better then.

I then started adding the carbon powder, one teaspoon at first, but it didnt seem to do much to the color. After having added a total of 5 teaspoons I thought it looked a bit darker than before but not nearly as dark as I would have liked, I didnt really want to add more though since the volume was increasing as well and I wasnt sure whether the carbon would have any effect on the polymerization process. So I decided to start painting.

I was happy to see that the Styrofoam was not being eaten away by the paint and on top of that, the paint, which liked a somewhat light grey in the pot, turned very dark once it was being spread out by the brush! A very nice color indeed! My theory is that the carbon powder did not really dissolve in the paint, but formed tiny bubbles of dry carbon which were surrounded by paint, so the paint didnt look any darker than before, only once it was being brushed out the bubbles would burst and the carbon would really mix with the paint.

The painting process was a pain. The foam had a lovely texture, a bit like lava rock, but that made it very hard to paint, brushing over it would leave a film of paint covering a small hole, which would then look like it was painted, but a few minutes later the film would have burst and a nice white spot was then visible. It took about 1 hours or so to do the 120 x 50 cm of background. Its currently drying on the balcony, tomorrow I will wash it off and hopefully will find that the paint has dried/polymerized properly This afternoon I think Ill go look for some nice looking rocks for making terraces in the tank.

edit: some typos

[span class="edited"][Edited by 2004-04-17 06:08][/span]

Sounds like a plan... just make sure that you soak the wood long enough to get the tannins out the pieces. They'll discolour your water and make it slightly softer. This in no way harms fish, but just doesn't look quite right.

They're still soaking, though I'm not quite sure how long I can wait before putting them in And besides that, since I intend to have fish in there which like soft and slightly acidic water I don't mind it too much. I think that as long as I keep doing some frequent water changes, especially in the beginning, I should be fine.

Hey, really nice. Welcome to FP. Keep us posted on the project and provide pics when you can.

Thanks for the welcome, and I intend to keep updating this as I go, that's why I named it a Diary , so to continue with a short update:

Day 6: I didn't have too much time today to do much on the tank, after a long day at work me and my wife had the weekly dancing class (and for you guys out there, it's not nearly as horrible to do as everyone says it is) and then we stopped by at a restaurant on the way back, so we only arrived home at 10 pm. It gave me just enough time to trim the panels of the Styrofoam background so that they now actually fin in the tank. Even though they're white it still looks good. However, they still need some work as at the sides of the tank they don't quite reach the glass completely and there is just enough space for a fish to force its way in between and then to get stuck... and knowing fish that is exactly what they will do, so I think I'll round off the edges a bit tomorrow and make an opening where I can hide the filter drain. Tomorrow I might even reach the point that I can start the painting *shivers*

Hey, really nice. Welcome to FP. Keep us posted on the project and provide pics when you can.

Sounds like a plan... just make sure that you soak the wood long enough to get the tannins out the pieces. They'll discolour your water and make it slightly softer. This in no way harms fish, but just doesn't look quite right.

Day 5: Im very excited, its 10 in the evening and the aquarium has just been delivered! Its too late to do anything about it, but Ive just put it in its future place and added the unpainted background pieces to the tank. Of course I had not taken into account that the measurements of the tank that the factory gives are outside measurements and that the 55 cm high therefore is in fact on the inside only about 50 cm since the lamps are in there too. So I have to make the background pieces a bit shorter, no problem.

Also, the Guy who sold me the tank told me that he didnt have enough of the basalt split that I intend to use as substrate, so I can pick that up only later, on the good side though was that he is going to give me FREE fluorescent lamps fro the tank since the Juwel TL lamps are just ordinary office lamps. Since I had planned on replacing them anyway this is a nice surprise.

Besides the aquarium delivery I also today took care of the bogwood, I had intended to boil them here at home (to get rid of any bacteria and fungi etc), but then I remembered that at work I have access to an autoclave. An autoclave is basically a pumped up pressure cooker, where you can boil stuff at 120 C, if thats done for 20 minutes you kill absolutely everything. So I asked my boss if it was ok, and then I amused my colleagues by warning them of a possible smelly autoclave room and dragging those chunks of wood around. So now the wood is sterile and currently soaking in a big bucket of water so itll sink once it goes into the tank. Tomorrow Ill continue with the background.

Day 4: We went to find some paint today, at the second store they did have some paint which was of the right kind (I think): Water based Epoxy paint well you can clean your tools with water after wards. Once it hardens out it should be completely waterproof and the reason why I wanted water based epoxy is that after the paint has settled, all the unwanted chemicals can be washed off since theyre water soluble. The only thing which Im still worried about is that it may actually melt the Styrofoam, but Ill find out about that later, several sites Ive seen on the web have been using epoxy paint on Styrofoam, so I guess it should work I hate the uncertainty! Anyway, like I said, that store did have the correct paint, but it only came in one color: grey. It was called Stone-grey, but it did not really convince me, so I left it there. The third store did not have the right one, but what it did have was all kinds of different pigments to color paint. For most of them I had no idea at all what the chemical composition was and whether it would be bad for the future fish or not, but one of the pigments was 100% Carbon. So in the end I bought a small can of carbon and then went back to the previous store to buy the grey paint. The idea is now that Ill mix them until I have the color which Id like. This will involve a bit of testing in order to find out if it works, if not Ill end up with a stone-grey background.

Day 3: The Silicone kit had dried nicely and today I continued the cutting, this time I was a bit rougher to get a nice texture to the rocks and to get rid of the sharper edges, it resulted in an even greater mess then yesterday. The entire balcony (and me too) was covered in that crap. After vacuuming the balcony, replacing the bag in the vacuum cleaner and then vacuuming some more, everything was clean again and was it time to use the heat gun.

Since the gasses that come free when melting Styrofoam are very poisonous I opened all the windows on the balcony and since it was quite windy the gasses didnt bother me. I started out on a test piece since I didnt really know how fast the Styrofoam would melt. It melted actually quite slow when I held the gun at about 3 5 cm away from the surface. What you actually see is that the cells of the foam collapse, leaving a bit of a pitted structure which looks pretty rocky. Now I just have to find the right paint, and wait for the aquarium to arrive so I can figure out where Ill put the filter elements.

Day 1: The delivery of the aquarium is still a couple of days off, but Ive started to get some things together. First we went to some pet stores to get some bogwood and a hose for my filter. The first store we went to had ridiculous prices, one piece (rather large) cost 80 !!! In the second store I found some rather nice pieces (3) which were of a better price and cost 8 each, still more than I thought it would have cost me, but this is Finland after all and everything is expensive here.

Next we went to Bauhaus to buy a big piece of Styrofoam, a paint-stripper (pumped up hair dryer), silicone kit and epoxy paint. This all was for the creation of a background for the aquarium. I detest those flower prints that they sell as backgrounds for aquaria and the two kinds of background the aquarium shop had were ridiculously priced. One piece (which did look good I must admit) was about 80 x 40 cm and cost 180 !!!! I only have one word for it: Insane! Thats about half the price of the aquarium, and I would have needed 2 of them. A second option was a fairly standard piece of 50 x 40, it didnt look particularly good and yet it cost 25 a piece I needed 3 of them, so it would have cost 75 in total for a  ty background.

After reading some on the Internet about creating your own background I felt confident I could make a real nice one myself for about half of the price. It involves a lot of cutting in Styrofoam and then using the heat gun to get a nice rough texture and finally a layer of epoxy paint to give it a good color and seal if off so the fish can not damage it. Unfortunately Bauhaus did not have any good paint.

Today I did some of the cutting of the Styrofoam and glued some extra pieces onto it to make some larger rocks tomorrow Ill finalize the cutting and do the actual heating. The big piece of Foam was first cut into a piece of 120 x 55 cm and this was then cut into three pieces of 40 x 55 cm. This was done because otherwise Id never be able to get it into the aquarium since there is a support beam in the middle of the tank. One thing about the Styrofoam is that it gives an absolute horrible mess with the little white balls. A very sharp knife will keep that to a minimum, but it still took some time to clean up. A vacuum cleaner was very helpful with it since the little white balls are static, only the strong vacuum was able to get them off me.

I made some pictures of the process but they haven't been developed yet, once I have my Diary running on my own website I'll post a link to them so you can see how the whole process looked

Hi everyone,

I just registered to these forums and thought I should introduce myself to you. I'm a 31 year old Dutchman who's currently living in Finland and fro most of my life I've had aquariums. Only the last 5 years I haven't had one, this was mostly related to the fact that I was moving to Finland. Recently I've been itching to setup a tank in my appartment, and last week I could no longer resist and bought myself a 65 gallon tank (240 liters) which should be delivered to my appartment today or tomorrow (hopefully today).

My plans for the tank are big, it'll be a community tank according to "Dutch" style (I'm dutch, so that does make sense doesn't it? ), meaning it will have lots of plants and a high degree of aquascaping. During the weekend I created myself a custom background from styrofoam, which now awaits the delivery of the aquarium so I can start hiding the filter components in it and then paint it with epoxy paint. I'm taking photos of the process (old fashioned real ones) and plan to keep some sort of diary of the building process online. I'll probably post the text with some pics here, if you're interested.

you'll hear more in other posts.