Just Joined

[ALIFER]

Hi All,
I've got an ALIFE 7 that has been setup for a couple of years now. I upgraded the lighting to two 28 watt PC. You can check out pictures on my Yahoo photo section.
Before the ALIFE I had a 12 gallon cube with CSL lighting and a 10 gallon refugium. It was running for a couple of years till I trashed the deep sand bed in the refugium and started a huge algae plague that wiped out the tank. You live & learn. The FW planted tank in my photos is the same tank after my reef crashed. I don’t have any photos of the 12 setup as a reef.
GOOD REEF’IN
http://photos.yahoo.com/rick_j_g

[EyeReef]

welcome..awesome reef you have there

[MarLooney]

hey guys don't get madd at me... but is that a Neolamprologus in your freshwater planted tank? ><

great tank! really nice xenia and it looks like you need to get rid of some. you've come to the right place for that. i really liked that red macro but didn't see it in your later pics... do you still have any of that. i'd like some.

[ALIFER]

I don't have much of the red macro left in the ALIFE 7. It grew like crazy for a few months, then died off. It just started growing again at the overflow, but is only a couple of inches long right now. If the red macro gets larger I will definitely give some of it away. When it grew large the first time it would sprout plantlets off the large leaves(?) just like java fern.

And yes that was a Neolamprologus in my planted tank. I didn’t use RO water, so the fish did well until I gave it away when I broke down the tank. FW planted tanks are way to much work to maintain. A lot more than nano-reefs. You have to trim all the plants every week, fertilize and keep the CO2 going.

Thanks for the KUDOs
Rick

[MarLooney]

cool! maybe you should attach it to rubble somehow so it won't get clogged in the overflow... well you got experience with it... i'm sure you know what you're doin with that, but the Neolamprologus shouldn't have been in a planted tank. most tanganyikan tanks keep no plants or driftwood at all because they like it highly alkaline... totally opposite to the planted tank. oh wells, he's gone... hope you enjoyed it while you had 'em.

[ALIFER]

I hate to talk to much about freshwater on this forum, there is a FW planted tank forum for that, but you can have a planted tank with hard alkaline water if you use bright PC or MH lights, fertilize correctly and do lots of water changes. Hard alkaline water, like the water here in SD county, is much more stable than soft acidic water. I had a Labeotropheus Fuelliborni tank running for eight years that was thick with java fern. The tank was a 60 gallon with 80 watts of light and I had it on a drip system that changed out 50% of the water every week.. The plants used the waste from the fish, usually between 20 to 30, as fertilizer. All the plants helped give the fry a place to hideout until they could fend for themselves. Of course a tank full of java fern doesn’t really count as a planted tank, but you get the idea. The point of the story is that there is often more than one way to run a tank successfully!
Now back to Reefer Madness.
Rick