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Tank: ADA 60F (60 cm x 30 cm x 25 cm) - 10.8 gallons

Lighting: Chihiros WRGB II Slim

Hardscape: Sensei Stone (Magura sandstone, with quartz and feldspar). GH, KH, pH neutral

Substrate: Crushed lava stone (to support hardscape), AF Lava Soil, and maybe Controsoil Extra fine? Still deciding

Filter: Oase Filtosmart 100 with Jardli 12/16 glass lily pipes (modified intake for shrimp)

CO2: GLA GRO Cartridge (once it is in stock)

Primary plants:


Livestock: Neocaridina Ocean Blue; maybe +/- a few Least Rasbora (Boraras urophthalmoides)

Still in the idea/planning stage of this tank. For a challenge I am pushing myself outside of my own comfort zone here, so this will be entirely new territory for me. Modern Iwagumi/diorama is not something I thought I would want to try, but my interest has grown in recent months, so why not give it a try? It will work, or it won’t. If it doesn’t work it’s always an excuse to rescape.

I have an ADA 60F tank sitting on my kitchen counter.



It was the first tank I purchased when I dunked my toes back into the hobby last year, that I scaped with some Ancient stone and driftwood for a few shrimp.




Once it was planted I quickly got in over my head on too many stems in the back, and moss growing too well on the rocks to maintain in a short, cramped space, and had some persistent CO2 related algae courtesy of a drifting needle valve. Thinking about rescaping the tank I had started to tear it down last week, removing most of the stems, and then found myself needing a temporary grow-out tank for some minnow fry, so the tank won’t be fully torn down and scaped for a few more weeks yet, but that gives me time to play around.

So, with an eye toward some sort of modern Iwagumi/diorama, I needed some hardscape. Without the luxury of walking into a store that caters to aquascapers, I am usually stuck with buying hardscape sight unseen. Rather than have a plan, and then try to find the materials, I ordered some rock to see what I would end up with, and let the hardscape inspire me.

Enter 55 lbs of Sensei stone in assorted shapes and sizes.



Why Sensei stone? I didn’t want to use Seiryu. It’s beautiful, easy to work with, and readily available, but I really needed this rock to be inert. Something in this tank’s original build sent GH and KH through the roof, and it had to be either the Controsand, or the or the ‘Ancient stone’ or both. I should have tested it in water first, and I learned that lesson the hard way. The 60F is a small and shallow tank, and shrimp loathe parameter swings, so this time I want to be able to control the water parameters a little more easily (especially the Ca/Mg ratios), so I am starting with inert rocks. Also, in case I wasn’t thrilled with the stones sent to me, I still wanted rocks that were easy to break into usable pieces, so no Hakkai stone this time. I did consider Frodo stone, but would like to use that in at least a 90P. So, hammer and cold chisel at the ready, Sensei turns out to have been a good choice.

The majority of the rocks were interesting either in color or texture, and reasonable in scale for a tank this size.

I did a quick speed-scape on Saturday afternoon with the majority of the larger stones, more for fit, and quickly ruled out some particularly chonky rocks. Thankfully, I saved the lid from the 60F tank when I ordered it, so it is currently my temporary dojo for now. I seriously need to build a real one, it is difficult to get much height in a cardboard lid!



My phone doesn't do it justice here, but Sensei has some interesting character, with neutral greys, and warmer tones that run throughout the rock due to insoluble iron deposits. I think it’s pretty flexible in that it is easy to pair with a variety of sands or soils quite easily. I could use something like WIO Rocket sand to bring out the greys, or Colorado sand to accentuate the warm reddish brown tones. For playing around purposes I just opened an extra bag of La Plata from the 150 build.



Not the all stone was well suited for use in a tank this size, though. That large stone center top in the image above is at least as thick as it is wide, and WAY too beefy and blocky to be useful, even if this was a 90P. Too many like that, and there would be no need for plants at all. It’s always difficult wanting to smash something you just purchased, but this morning I took a deep breath, and unleashed a hammer and cold chisel (honestly just the hammer works pretty darned well with with the strata in this stone) to see what I would end up with. Worse case scenario, I will end up with some accent gravel, because Sensei is difficult to match in color and texture with the accent gravels I have see out there.



What do you know…smashing it worked pretty well, and I much prefer the shards that I broke off that blocky rock. Much more pointy potential there. There are a couple of other odd shaped stones I would be willing to resculpt into a more useable shape, too. It is actually quite fun bashing rocks with a hammer first thing on a Monday morning. I am now looking forward to playing around some more with these rocks, and seeing if I can up the drama a bit. We’ll see what I ultimately end up with. I don’t think the shrimp will mind too much regardless.

I have read an awful lot of warnings and conjectures by people. And “I used bdbs and a shrimp died so I got rid of it…”…

My personal experience with the product has been uneventful.

I have put rare earth magnets through a quart sample with no hint of any attraction and then washed it with no hint of oil slick or dustiness and then added the rest of the bag to a new aquarium with no treatment, no ill effect…

I have probably employed 7 bags by now with no hint of a problem. Dozens of corys sifting through the stuff as well as khuli loaches and yoyo loaches…. No hint of problems with them…

Other than it self leveling itself and being totally incapable of holding a slopeI love the stuff. The black always looks great. It costs about 1/4 aquarium specific substrates. I really haventexperienced anything negative about it…

I know it is popular here…. Has anybody here had bad experiences with it?

Ludwigia repens, hairgrass "eleocharis palustris" and ludwigia glandulosa all found locally growing emersed beside water and all growing submerged in water. Nice freebys if they survive the transition theres 20,000 stems in this tiny little pond. all clean no bugs put in tank with no fish to be safe will peroxide dip it before moving into other tank. 1 bunch l repens last pic I picked 8 days ago grown 2" and top turning more red with no melt at all. Well see how it goes. All found beside my local Lincoln dealer parking lot lol.
I've got local emersed plants before I know where theres a storm of lemon bacopa and anacharis is. Seems it always melted badly to mush. These plants are growing emersed for a week then submersed for days when water levels go up. Maybe they are more hardy being grown above and below water over and over? They may all melt to turds in weeks lol.

See this post regarding AR Mini trimming/planting, and this post regarding Cyperus helferi trimming and planting!

I have hardly seen this subject talked about enough, but I think that it's one of the biggest reasons contributing to beginner's algae-filled downfalls! If you're buying plants from big stores like Aquarium Plants Factory (really good btw), Buceplant, etc. 90% of the plants you are receiving are terrestrially-grown.

Here's an important fact about terrestrially-grown aquarium plants

100% of all terrestrial leaves, when submerged under water, for any plant, will eventually get algae and die.
Some can take a while (anubias, java fern, cyperus helferi), while others will either melt (Crypts) or quickly get algae (AR Mini, Staurogyne repens, stem plants, etc)

But what about buying submerged-growth plants? From hobbyists, or BurrAqua, for example?

There is still a chance that your tank's conditions are different enough that many, if not most leaves you plant, will melt/die/attract algae.

How do we fix this? By leaving only enough leaves for the plant to continue to absorb light and put out new growth. Usually the top 4-6 leaves for stem plants.



It's a lot of work up front, but you will MAJORLY reduce the amount of waste, DOC 's, and algae-inducing scenarios if you trim your plants before planting.

I've done this in ALL of my tanks in the last 4 years with great success.

The easiest way to do this is with stainless squeeze scissors over your sink:

Here's the ones I recommend.

Yes, it takes a ton of patience. But if it could make a big difference in preventing the 2-3 month algae bloom in your tank, would you do it?

Here are some specific plant examples:​

For most true stem plants, I like to leave 3-4" of stem, trimming roots if necessary, and leaving only 4-6 of the freshest leaves. More than that, they will eventually be algae magnets. Less than that (like 2 leaves only) they might not survive the shock.


Lysimachia nummularia 'Aurea', only a few top leaves left, 3" of stem.


Hygrophila corymbosa. Note how I left the leaf nodes on the stem? That's where roots will grow from. Almost all stem plants need nodes to grow roots, even if you've removed the leaves from them.



Terrestrially-grown AR 'Mini' from APF. See how I did the same in this thread for my previous tanks.



This Anubias barteri var. coffeefolia was grown terrestrially (often called 'emersed' or emergent) in a greenhouse. I removed all but the newest 3 leaves, and trimmed the roots too. Terrestrial roots are quite different from submerged with certain plants.



Almost ALL Cryptocoryne species are grown terrestrially. These plants grow as a Rosette, where the inner-most leaves on the "stem" are the freshest, and the outer-most are the oldest. I removed a TON of old terrestrial leaves, leaving just enough for the plant to be able to grow new submerged leaves in my tank as quickly as possible, while leaving as few algae-attracting terrestrial leaves as possible. I also trimmed the roots, which were 5" long upon receiving the plant.



Lobelia cardinalis 'mini'

Penthorum sedoides. Would also look very similar for Staurogyne repens, too.


Did you know that Blyxa japonica is actually a stem plant? It looks like a rosette, but it's actually a squat, wide stem plant. The lowest/outermost leaves are the oldest, and even though this is a true aquatic plant with no terrestrial form in nature, I know that it likes to throw a fit and melt a good portion of it's oldest leaves when transitioning to my tank's conditions. Here's what it looked like when I received it from @Burr740:


Nice and trimmed up. Less problematic at the 1-2 month mark in the tank's development, I know it!

What about delicate/feather plants?
They're super annoying to prep. I still only keep the top 3-4" max.


With Myriophyllum mattogrossense 'Golden', I only keep a few inches and still try to remove some of the lower leaves that would otherwise just rot by being buried in my inert sand.



What about Myriophyllum sp. "Roraima"? F*ck that. Nightmare to trim lower leaves, just trim it to 3" (not pictured) and discard the bottom when planting.

Curious what you guys think! I know I could receive plenty of "I've never done this, my tank has been fine" but I'd recommend trying it first before having a strong opinion of it

By the way, all plants pictured were actually used in my upcoming 120cm Showcase tank:

I recently added a small adjustable powerhead/wavemaker that's set to constant flow mode to increase surface agitation, gas exchange, and overall circulation. The goal wasn't to reduce CO₂, but to use stronger gas exchange along with adequate injection to get CO₂ up quickly before lights-on and then reach a stable equilibrium instead of continuing to accumulate throughout the photoperiod

Big thanks to @Dennis Wong / 2Hr Aquarist for his articles explaining this approach. I've learned so much from them. It's completely changed how I look at CO₂ injection and surface agitation

For testing I'm using a freshly calibrated Apera PH60 for pH, Hanna Checktemp 1 for temperature, and the Hanna HI3818 CO₂ titration kit to check actual CO₂ concentration. CO₂ kicked on at 12 PM, lights came on at 3 PM, and CO₂ shut off at 8 PM

Tank/water parameters: UNS 60U, Controsoil, RO/DI remineralized with APT Sky, GH 5 to 6, KH 0. My best degassed pH reference is around 7.30, so I'm seeing roughly a 1.7 pH drop at plateau. With 0 KH the standard pH/KH chart doesn't apply, so I'm using the Hanna kit alongside pH to track the curve

Today's testing showed a really good trend. The tank was already at pH 5.60 by 2:30 PM, reached 5.59 at lights-on, and stayed essentially flat through 8 PM. Hanna measured approximately 44 ppm at lights-on and 44 to 45 ppm at the end of the injection period. Since I was essentially at plateau 30 minutes before lights-on, I now feel comfortable reducing my pre-light injection from 3 hours to 2½ hours and seeing if I can still reach the same level by lights-on

My original CO₂ target was around 40 ppm, but at this point I'm wondering if it's worth trying to make a microscopic needle-valve adjustment just to knock off ~4 ppm when the curve is this stable

Would you guys leave it around 44 ppm or bring it down slightly closer to 40?

There's no livestock yet, so I'm taking advantage of this time to get everything dialed in. Plants are doing great. Planned livestock is cardinal tetras, pygmy cories, Amano shrimp, and eventually Caridina, and I'm planning to start stoc
king next week

In my never ending quest to piddle around, I have been looking at setting up a nano eco tank/bowl with minimum maintenance. The main issue I have is controlling the temp. The temps in my house fluctuate between 68 - 71 degree regularly and can drop to lower 60s a few weeks in the fall and spring when we do not have the heater on.

Has anyone thought about or had success using an animal heating pad under the bowl/tank? While most are designed for reptiles and regulate between 100-120F, there are some for more mixed use that can be controlled from 68F and up. I don't think this would be too hard to set up. Could be to keep the inside of the tank clear of equipment. Radiant floor heating for your shrimp/fish.

Heating Pad

If you've been in the aquarium hobby for a while, I'm sure you've created or picked up so valuable hacks that fall into the tips, tricks and time-savers categories. So, in an effort to compile and share them, let's post them here.

This site is about sharing knowledge and experiences so don't be shy, no hack is too small or silly.

Please post yours.

Anybody else stay up late to watch the IAPLC rankings. As usual, my choices would have been different. Some scapes ranked in the 40s got picked by some judges as the best, so at least I'm not alone in that. Highest ranking by a U.S. contestant was Ryan Noel at, I believe, 31. Congrats to Ryan.

Been meaning to write this up for a while, so here it is. Over the last few months I've built a full custom controller setup for my 130L planted, CO2 injected tank, running on three ESP32 boards working together. It replaced an ageing Up Aqua CO2/pH controller and turned into a genuinely complete automation system for water changes, dosing, CO2, top-off, and reservoir monitoring. Sharing the overview here in case it's useful or interesting to anyone else down a similar rabbit hole.

The short version​

Three boards, each with its own job:

• Water change controller — drains, refills, remineralises, and doses the tank automatically, sitting mostly idle between weekly changes.
• Tank controller — the brains of day-to-day operation, running CO2/pH control, top-off monitoring, the reservoir, and a small front panel with live readouts.
• Alexa bridge — ties the whole thing into Alexa for voice control and equipment scenes, and handles the feeding routine.

They talk to each other over WiFi and three deliberate hardwired links for the communications that genuinely shouldn't depend on the network as they are safety critical.

Water changes​

Weekly, fully automated. Connect a line from the WaterDrop filter, a drain line that goes outside to the garden or lawn (both with quick connects and manual valves for safety), choose your water change volume in litres, press start and it then:
- runs through safety prompts to ensure everything is connected and safety valves are set correctly.
-prompts to clean prefilters
-prompts to measure remineralisers (calculated on screen, based on your water change volume selection).
-it then drains and refills with RO water. It also turns off/ on smart plugs so skimmers, co2, heaters ect are off for draining then start to turn them on as water fill reaches certain thresholds.

• during refil it remineralises to target GH and KH from a container with a magnetic stirrer with a perialstatic dosing pump that fires at set percentages of fill.
• it then connects to my Chihiros dosing pumps and fires the dosing boosts to preload nutrients (again these doses are scaled with selected water change volume)

-all without me touching anything. In fact it now means I can mow the lawn during water changes!
- It doses potassium bicarbonate for KH, calcium and magnesium sulfate for GH, and boosts macros (nitrate, phosphate, potassium, micros), again, all scaled to my actual water change volume.
Everything's logged, every step confirmed before moving to the next, with a wizard-style setup so I can adjust the fill amount, KH target, and anything else on the fly.
I also get phone updates, the fill solenoid is connected with a flow rate sensor, temperature probe and TDS sensor. So every 10L I get an update on the flow rate, tds and temperature of that 10L fill and average so far, so I can spot any issues. It will also abort the water change, stop filter.

CO2 and pH​

This was the original reason the whole project started. My old analogue controller had a pretty coarse hysteresis, and in low KH water even small CO2 swings move pH more than I'd like. The new controller runs a proper pH probe on a scheduled window, targets a specific pH with a tight, tunable hysteresis, and logs everything continuously. It also catches things a dumb timer never could, a sudden pH crash with the solenoid already closed pointed straight at a CO2 regulator dumping its tank, something I'd never have caught otherwise until it was a much bigger problem. The Atlas Ezo ph sensor setup is elite and far more accurate than my previous setup. I can also see live updates, get phone alerts for certain events and have set safety alets and shutoffs for events like rapid changes in ph.
I have also put a weight sensor under my CO2 bottle so it tells me how full/empty my co2 bottle is and predicts refill date based on useage (this is untested as it's still so new, I don't have the data for it to be accurate.)

Dosing​

Being sick of the Chihiros app occasionally being unavailable this year, I have given over control of the scheduling and setup to my controller. I have my own dashboard and phone app that does this now and can send schedules and settings to the Chihiros pumps. It has taken some trial error and bluetooth sniffing apps to work this out but it is rock solid now.
Four channel dosing pump, fully scripted daily doses plus automatic post-water-change boosts, calculated from my actual verified nutrient targets rather than rough guesses. Doses are triggered automatically the moment a water change finishes.

Top-off and reservoir​

For now, the auto top-off unit itself does the actual work, but the controller now watches the reservoir independently, a proper pressure-based level sensor for the real litre count, plus a simple mechanical float as a dumb, sensor-agnostic backup. If the float ever trips, ATO shuts down immediately and I get a notification, worded differently depending on whether the pressure sensor agrees with the float or not, since a disagreement between the two usually points at the pressure sensor itself needing a look rather than a genuinely empty reservoir. I have some optical sensors on the way, and hopefully by next week the controller is running the ATO independently.

Feeding​

A small but genuinely nice touch. Feeding pauses CO2 injection, filter and skimmer automatically, it's voice activated or you can use a unit mounted button, and the front panel readouts switch to a simple "feeding" display while the filter's off, since the normal sensor numbers would be meaningless with no flow through the lines anyway.

Remote monitoring​

Everything logs to a Grafana dashboard, I have pH, temperature, TDS, reservoir level se sors, it also logs CO2 state, with history of all controller actions that I can actually look back through rather than just a live snapshot. Genuinely useful for spotting slow trends, not just catching sudden problems.

Alexa integration​

Voice control for scenes around water changes, changing settings and feeding, equipment turning off and on automatically at the right points in each process, and a physical feed button that fires the exact same routine as the voice command.

Safety, and why it mattered more than any single feature​

If there's one thing I'd want someone building something similar to take away, it's this. Every automated system that can act on its own needs to fail toward safe, not just work correctly when everything's fine.


A few of the principles that ended up running through the whole build:

• Solenoids fail closed. Power loss means CO2 and water stay off, never on, by hardware design, not firmware logic that could have a bug in it.
• A tripped safety condition can't be quietly dismissed. If something raises an alert, like the backup float, you can acknowledge it, but the system won't let you clear it while the actual problem is still physically present. No accidentally waving away a real fault.
• The one link that has to work regardless of WiFi, does. CO2 and ATO pausing during a water change runs over a direct hardwired connection between boards, not the network. Everything else can be a bit more relaxed about connectivity; that one thing can't be.
• A backup sensor's only job is to disagree usefully. The float switch isn't there to be a second source of truth, it's there to catch the primary sensor being wrong. When they disagree, the alert tells me which one to actually go check.
• Never power anything from two sources at once. Learned that one the hard way, destroyed a board's regulator early on doing exactly that. So it now has wifi firmware updates for each board, to save the USB input power when updating by PC
  
  None of this was designed perfectly the first time either, more caught through actually running it and paying attention than getting it right on paper up front. A few genuine bugs this build taught me: features that were fully coded but sitting behind a switch I'd forgotten to flip on, so they looked complete but never actually ran; a menu screen that could lose progress if you walked away at the wrong moment during a slow calibration step. Both fixed once they showed up in real use, which is really the whole point of building it in stages rather than all at once and hoping. I have spent weeks finding and squashing bugs before I have given over control of the tank to it.
  
  Next on the list:
  Heater/fan control, full ATO control, uninteruptable power unit uninterruptible that alerts me to power outages and turns on air pumps.
  
  It is also in a pretty basic case and the cutouts are purposely oversized. I have ordered smoked acrylic to 'wrap' it in so it appears to be black rectangular box, with only the LED parameter readouts (temp, pH, TDS and ATO reservoir litres) visible through the smoke tinted acrylic and the two black control knobs that wake sleeping OLED screens, all other controls will be behind hinged flaps. I want to make sure all the sensors etc are wired correctly though before I wrap and anchor wiring.
  
  The great thing is, every time I think of something I want to add, it is a coding session with the help of AI and finding the sensors or equipement required. I can wake up with an idea and genuinely have it implemented with an hour or two of soldering and coding. It fits my tank like a glove and is infinitely adaptable. menu setup and setting options all added as I think of them!
  
  I will add some pictures below of the in progress build! I wanted to share in case anyone is thinking of doing the same, with the prices of ESP32s and the sensors (except for the Atlas Ezo chips! which are expensive but well worth it!) it is definitely a project in reach of anyone with a basic idea of code and soldering.

I want to thank @Unexpected for introducing me to this new forum, but most importantly for him being the first ever to build the Horizontal CO2 Reactor. I feel honored that "Yugang Reactor" as he calls it (Yugang 鱼缸 means fish tank) is introduced in @Unexpected journal, but it would be a pity if that journal gets cluttered with too much reactor talk. So let me open a dedicated thread for discussions, questions and help on this Horizontal Reactor.

I have been experimenting for years with CO2, and at some time I took videos of my (modified) Aquamedic reactor to watch the bubbles in slow motion. To my surprise I found that the combined surface area of the bubbles was not very high for achieving a 1.5 pH drop in my 250 liter tank, and that CO2 absorbs so fast in water that the lifetime of bubbles is quite short. So .... we don't need to juggle bubbles at all, we can just create a very simple absorption interface between flowing water and a pocket of CO2 above it. The Horizontal reactor is surprisingly simple, and has some benefits that we won't find in diffusers or conventional Cerges / Griggs bubble reactors:

• Simple rules to find the correct dimensions for any tank, a small nano tank or a huge tank the size of a swimming pool.
• Very easy and cheap to build with plumbing materials. No fragile parts, low risk of leakage or malfunction.
• 100% CO2 absorption efficiency
• No need to experiment with vortices, venturis, diffusers, needles wheels, impellers / rotors, multi stage reactors - it is just a pipe with a gentle flow of water.
• No noise
• No mist in the tank
• No maintenance, and stable performance over time
• Virtually no reduction of flow from pump
• A purging valve is optional, as the reactor will purge itself from excessive trapped air.
• The reactor can be configured so that in the event of a failure, CO2 injection will not exceed a limit and fish cannot be gassed. Inherently safe.
• The reactor can be configured so that we do not need a precision regulator, because the reactor controls the CO2 injection rate

Or a multi stage version ...


A detailed thread can be found on UKAPS, linked with the kind permission from Scapecrunch forum moderators #1

I am happy to help new users to verify the calculations on reactor dimensions for their tank, please send me a PM.