SotaAquatics
- #1
Hey All,
Went up to a friend's house for the weekend, she hasn't been happy with her 40 breeder for awhile so we decided to work on a new aquascape for it. Will go over the build and what we did below. She wanted a cave theme up high in the background and I feel like we achieved it pretty well with our limited rock selection. This is mostly a hardscape build at this time, we are ordering plants for the tank and will hopefully have future updates once the tank gets planted and settled in. Final pictures will be at the end, no sneak peak - these are located in post #3 due to me getting carried away with pictures.
Most pictures had to be taken from an angle looking down due to some terrible window glare and no window shades. The layout does look a bit different looking straight in then what you see below. - Shown in the final picture.
This is the starting tank. Red lava rock with some flourite black. I think the red lava rock would have looked a lot better with a white or more natural sand color then the black. There are a few twigs of dead monte carlo in there, some really rough repens, a flame sword and some anubias.
First step of course, empty out the tank, we put all the fish - a bunch of mixed guppies, two corys, and a couple of nerites into a 29 holding tank. She hated the guppies so I took them home with me, I believe the plan will be for a very limited fish count in the future and focus will be the design and plants.
I can't begin to tell you how much a difference a background makes on a tank, even just a solid painted color. We taped up the tank and spray painted the back with some flat black rustoleum. Super quick and easy process and in my opinion it makes a huge difference in any tank design.
Here it is set back up on the stand, cleaned out and painted. Always a big difference when you cant see the wall or cords/hoses out the back.
Next step was playing around with the rock we had available, we used seiryu stone, which is pretty expensive so we wanted to maximize what we could. We came up with some rocks that we felt could make a suitable cave set up when put next to each other - I don't have a picture of this as we just did this on the floor, basically played with them like legos until we got what we liked.
After we had the main rock layout we wanted, I cut and zip tied some egg crate light diffuser together. We wanted the cave to be elevated up high in the back and slope down to the front.
I made multiple compartments in the layout, this was to help reinforce the structure, some of these rocks were quite heavy. Inside each of the compartments we placed lava rock inside little filter media bags. This was to help reduce weight for the amount of height we were going for in the tank as well as help avoid any substrate compacting. The egg crate on the right was to stop me from knocking the light off the back of the tank while I was working... learned that the hard way.
Next we started to reconstruct our cave design. We used cigarette filters ripped apart to wedge between the rocks then soaked them with superglue. This created a strong sturdy connection between the rocks as well as allowed us to fill up some gaps that made the individual pieces look more as one.
Continuing on with the cave feature...
We used lava rock and some more filter media bags at the base of our slope. This was more to help keep the structure of it and reduce the amount of erosion that happens once water is added. Also added on the main front slope was a long strip of egg crate light diffuser, this worked fantastic to stop the substrate from running down the slope.
Our big placements are done, next we had to fill in some holes in our cave wall where the substrate from the back was pouring through.
Continued in Post #3 below.
Went up to a friend's house for the weekend, she hasn't been happy with her 40 breeder for awhile so we decided to work on a new aquascape for it. Will go over the build and what we did below. She wanted a cave theme up high in the background and I feel like we achieved it pretty well with our limited rock selection. This is mostly a hardscape build at this time, we are ordering plants for the tank and will hopefully have future updates once the tank gets planted and settled in. Final pictures will be at the end, no sneak peak - these are located in post #3 due to me getting carried away with pictures.
Most pictures had to be taken from an angle looking down due to some terrible window glare and no window shades. The layout does look a bit different looking straight in then what you see below. - Shown in the final picture.
This is the starting tank. Red lava rock with some flourite black. I think the red lava rock would have looked a lot better with a white or more natural sand color then the black. There are a few twigs of dead monte carlo in there, some really rough repens, a flame sword and some anubias.
First step of course, empty out the tank, we put all the fish - a bunch of mixed guppies, two corys, and a couple of nerites into a 29 holding tank. She hated the guppies so I took them home with me, I believe the plan will be for a very limited fish count in the future and focus will be the design and plants.
I can't begin to tell you how much a difference a background makes on a tank, even just a solid painted color. We taped up the tank and spray painted the back with some flat black rustoleum. Super quick and easy process and in my opinion it makes a huge difference in any tank design.
Here it is set back up on the stand, cleaned out and painted. Always a big difference when you cant see the wall or cords/hoses out the back.
Next step was playing around with the rock we had available, we used seiryu stone, which is pretty expensive so we wanted to maximize what we could. We came up with some rocks that we felt could make a suitable cave set up when put next to each other - I don't have a picture of this as we just did this on the floor, basically played with them like legos until we got what we liked.
After we had the main rock layout we wanted, I cut and zip tied some egg crate light diffuser together. We wanted the cave to be elevated up high in the back and slope down to the front.
I made multiple compartments in the layout, this was to help reinforce the structure, some of these rocks were quite heavy. Inside each of the compartments we placed lava rock inside little filter media bags. This was to help reduce weight for the amount of height we were going for in the tank as well as help avoid any substrate compacting. The egg crate on the right was to stop me from knocking the light off the back of the tank while I was working... learned that the hard way.
Next we started to reconstruct our cave design. We used cigarette filters ripped apart to wedge between the rocks then soaked them with superglue. This created a strong sturdy connection between the rocks as well as allowed us to fill up some gaps that made the individual pieces look more as one.
Continuing on with the cave feature...
We used lava rock and some more filter media bags at the base of our slope. This was more to help keep the structure of it and reduce the amount of erosion that happens once water is added. Also added on the main front slope was a long strip of egg crate light diffuser, this worked fantastic to stop the substrate from running down the slope.
Our big placements are done, next we had to fill in some holes in our cave wall where the substrate from the back was pouring through.
Continued in Post #3 below.
Guppies are easily accessible and easy to care for hard water fish so I don’t see why they should be hated. In my experience they’re very versatile. The original setup looked great but I can’t wait to see the final result.