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Hi all,

First time posting! I was browsing FB and saw someone posted a picture of their tank. Was wondering if anyone could help me ID the plant middle left? Crypt?

Thank you for your help!

Hi all
My Cambomba sometimes develops these roots from the nodes.
Rotala H'ra does it too, but not as aggressively as the Cambomba.
Any ideas why this happens?

Both tanks contain a lot of bucephalandra stems I have recently melted by feeding my caridina tanks with mulberry leaves. I have no idea what the heck happened but all buces melted in those tanks heavily over 3 days with every other plant + shrimp being fine. Don't wanna risk the plants dying so I'm throwing them back into high tech for a few months to recover.

Set Up:
Both tanks uses heavy co2 misting
Horticulture LED lights (dimmed, so probably 25-30 watts?)
Will steadily increase light weekly if I see no issues, max is 40 watts.
Dual sponge filters. (Air bubbles help prevent co2 gassing, also seems to really help stabilize tank, so less algae)
1 Internal filter with an atomizer for misting.

Regime:
All tanks get a 30-50% water change, twice per week.
Micros dosed daily (unless I forget, which happens fairly often.)
Macros Front Loaded and only in new incoming water.

6 Gallon bucket water change:
~350tds (Using seachem equilibrium remineralizer)
~22ppm KNO3, using KNO3 + KH2PO4
~40-50 ppm Potassium due to remineralizer
~4-5GH

Buce Lottery Colors
Lots of buces, various names, collected over the years. A lot of them were ultra rare and I cannot buy them anymore. Most of the ultra rare I probably accidentally killed from trying to grow them in a "no filter, no co2" style tank. Either way, not much color in low tech, will see what lottery colors we pull once they get going with better colors in higher lights + co2.

Both tanks are planted tightly front to back with bucephalandra. Kinda hard to see it all with moss blocking the way, but my view will be your view.

Random Mosses
Some mosses I've collected as well, honestly I grow a lot of them free floating so they kinda look the same. We will find out how they look after I attach them to something.

15 Gallon, very aged sand + pebble tank.

20 Gallon long, aged aquasoil I pulled from an existing caridina tank.


Wanted to take some macro shots, but does anyone know how to take an angle show on the glass without distortion? I have a DSLR long tube lens that works under water but color rendition is really bad.

Why so much moss?
Mostly to help stabilize the tank and to reduce light bleed. Less surface for algae to grow.

The Biomaster Thermo 600 on my farm tank had been screaming at me lately that it was time for some TLC. It was doing the typical air sucking, hard to prime, small leaks, etc. all the indications it needed to be fully torn down and have all the gaskets/o-rings lubricated. This is the nice thing about having extra complete filters so I can have a pump head, heater, priming assembly, and inlet/outlet connection unit all cleaned, lubed and ready to go on an active filter. This is especially true for the Inlet/Outlet Connection Unit which seems to be the most common cause of leaks and air intrusion. For this reason, I also keep a couple new spares on hand because I've had a couple break in different ways. Today, while tearing the old one down to lube not only the two visible o-rings, but also the 3 buried within, I broke one of the retaining tabs that hold the inner portion in tightly against those buried o-rings. When I grabbed a new one that I'd just recently purchased, I noticed the visible o-rings were now orange instead of the normal black. They also look a little beefier. I wonder if this is Oase addressing the known common issues with this assembly and making some quiet updates and improvements.



Oh, and the farm tank filter is running great again...so far.

I’ve been wanting to do a tank for a while that focuses just on finnicky plants -erios, lud. panatal, tonina and the sorts. So this is my detailed journal of how I start my planting process all the way from cycling to planting, fertilizing, water changes and the pitsfalls, lighting and what processes work best for me.

Equipment:
Oase biomaster2- 350
Fluval Visi-white 60P tank
Fzone CO2 regulator and a 2.5lb CO2 tank
Week aqua L600Pro Series Light
Fzone Brite60 Light
Yugang reactor made using a 375 mm PC cooling reservoir - will post another journal detailing this.

CO2:
1.3 pH drop from a baseline of pH 6.8.

Aquasoil:
Three 5L bags of APT Feast

Cycling:

APT Feast being a high organic content soil - I like to cycle it for a full month at least using the dark start method before planting anything. This is even more important for me as I almost exclusively use tissue cultures for my plants. Because I will be injecting CO2, the tank was also getting injected with CO2 during its dark start. I know there’s opinion out there that it’s a waste and what not, but I think CO2 levels in the water might affect microbial ecosystem development in the long run, so I like to start off by exposing the microbial community of the tank to CO2 levels it will be seeing in the long run.
The water parameters 2 weeks after start dark cycle were as follows:
Total ammonia : 10 ppm+
Nitrite: 10 ppm+
Nitrate : unreadable as the nitrite levels were interfering with the API test. I eventually used a 25% dilution to read 30 ppm+ nitrates.
At this point I did a large (100%) water change to remove some ammonia and speed up the leaching process. The steeper the diffusion gradient between the soil and water the quicker the ammonia leaches, hence large water changes facilitates that.

After 4 weeks I did another water test and the parameters were similar as above. Proceeded to do another 100% water change.

After 5 weeks I did another water test and this time the parameters were:
Total Ammonia: 1 ppm
Nitrite: 2 ppm+
Nitrate: 40 ppm+
Decided to give it another week to see if the nitrites would drop to below 0.5 ppm.

One week later the nitrites had vanished. I did another 100% water change.
So it takes about 6 weeks to fully cycle a tank with APT Feast if you don’t use any old media or cycling aid.

Next step is to plant the tank. I wanted this tank to focus on mostly uncommon species:
1. Ludwigia Pantanal
2. Ludwigia Arcuata
3. Tonina fluviatilis
4. Rotala Macrandra
5. Macrandra Mini Red
6. Mayaca Fluviatilis
7. Rotala Florida
8. Rotala Bonsai
9. Ludwigia Cuba- white edge
10. Ludwigia Senegalensis
11. Lysimachia Parv. red
12. AR mini
13. Bacopa compacta white
14. Erio Vietnam
15. Erio Quinquangulare
16. Crypt Flamingo for my centre piece

Here’s a photo after planting. Not all the species listed above are present in the photo but I did eventually add them once I was able to acquire them.

I’m also trying to make a carpet with buce needle leaf on the left side, we’ll see how that goes. I plant on planting clumps of ratnagiricum in the carpet once the carpet has settled in.

OK, so parameters after planting:
1. CO2: 1.3 pH drop from a baseline pH of 6.8. About 55-60 ppm possibly. The verify by making sure my drop checker is yellow before lights on. I turn on CO2 4 hours before lights on and turn it off 1 hour before lights off.

2. Lighting at 80% strength. I hadn’t hooked up the week aqua yet at that point so it’s just 80% on the fzone which would amount to about 60 umol of PAR at the substrate. After a week, I installed my weekaqua L series and increased the PAR to around 100 umol at the substrate. I’m a big fan of using high light (80-110) umol from day 1 of planting, I think this gives plants the best chance at fast growth. The faster the plants grow adapt and generate mass the higher my chances on skipping the diatom/GDA phase. Here’s an 8 gallon tank below where I used a 100W grow light from Day 1 of planting and you can see how the tank is algae free and growing rapidly at the 3 week mark.


This method has worked really well for me, although the key to this method is to maintain very stable nitrate levels. Your nitrates could be anywhere between 0-30ppm, and it won’t matter as long as it is kept stable. A common mistake is to not replenish nitrates after a large water change.

3. Fertilizers:
APT 1 - 1.5 ml per day

4. Water parameters:
KH - 0dKH
Nitrate: 10 ppm
Phosphate: 0 ppm

Here’s the tank now after 4 weeks of growth:


The macrandra on the left had been trimmed last week and replanted, they had almost reaching 80% of the tank height. The tonina at the back has settled in well, some diatoms on the lower leaves which I’m not worried about. Although I don’t think that’s where I’ll kepp the tonina long run. I might use it as a midground plant and maybe move the panatal where the tonina is. You can barely see the quinquangulare behind the AR mini, but they seemed to have settled down as well. I planted 6 crowns and lost 3 within the first 2 weeks. I suspect damage from transportation - they smelled like cooked spinach when I received them.
So as is evident from above, even though I’m supplying higher levels of lighting, diatoms and GDA haven’t really taken a hold yet. The key has been regular water changes to remove detritus produced by the ramshorns, keep a stable nitrate level of 10ppm, stable CO2 at 50+ppm and good plant husbandry. I always make a point of trimming away older and emersed leaves so they don’t attract algae. The ludwigia white is actually emersed. I have removed all of its emersed leaves except the ones from the top 2 internodes and as soon as I will see sideshoots grow and develop past the 2nd internode, I will trim them and replant them and uproot the emersed stem and toss it. The plant arrangment is a little “block-like” as of now, but this isn’t really the final arrangement. I prefer to grow the plants out in a rough layout before I arrange them once they’ve all taken off.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I will add to it as the tank develops in the upcoming weeks.

I've just spotted these latest Hygger luminaire lights.

All the bumf seems to claim that they only have RGB LEDs (all 5054 type). Very reasonable prices. Is this a complete bargain for a genuine RGB light ? Or is there a catch ?? THis is way off my areas of expertise.

Hi guys!

I'm new here, but not entirely new to planted tanks though I've been out of the hobby for the better part of the last decade between kids and moving a couple of times - but finally in a spot where I can do something again. I'm mostly going to be making things up as I go along, but plan on a lot of automation (I want to integrate everything into home assistant) and a lot of DIY as I love the challenge of building things out myself.

The starting point:

I picked up a 90P rimless, low-iron tank on a great deal.



I have a rough idea in my head for a stand to be built from plywood - just have a couple other house projects to finish off before starting that built.

Wife says I can only have one aquarium, so for this tank, I want to go all out with a sump to allow for auto top off, and auto water changes, auto fertilizer dosing etc. etc. I have half a plan in my mind.

I've also started on the light fixture which I've modeled up in CAD, and plan on making out of an 8020 extrusion, and some 3D printed bits.

I'm using bridgelux gen 3 thrive CW (3000k) and WW (5000k) LED strips which have super high CRI at 98+ along with some specific XPE2 wavelengths that I'll solder onto some starboards. Far Red (730nm), Red (654nm), Cyan (495nm), Blue (455nm), Visible UV (415nm). Each segment of the white channels will be on its own driver so I can adjust left to right brightness in thirds, and each colour channel on its own driver so I can vary each channel on a time-based approach.

These will be run from a custom PCB board with Meanwell N-LDD drivers, and will run ESPHome on an ESP32 so it can link up with my Home Assistant installation.


That's it for now, this will probably be a very slow build so be warned if you follow along!

This is the future home for the announcements when someone obtains an achievement badge. Let the games begin!

Started a new tank with the idea of show casing Lagenandra meeboldii which I have not showcased before. Wanted to feature Hygrophila lower Hlaingbwe, but I removed it later as I think it would be too large for this tank.

New substrate, new filter, squeezed filter mulm from the other matured tank, then ran the tank one week day before planting. 100% water change after planting, then 100% water change every other day since then. Dosing 1ml APT3 after water change day, and remineralizing to 5dGH using APT Sky. Trying out the low water column dosing approach for the initial period.

Filter: Oase 250
Lights: Week aqua a430 80%
Substrate: APT Feast

Was going to Journal about startup issues, however, it seems like the tank has already stabilized, skipping diatoms and green dust phase.

Freshly planted for a couple of days:
13/2/2026


Replanted the tops for Myriophyllum roraima, Cut and replanted Rotala blood red to begin building up the bush form. Trimmed old leaves
Foreground seems a bit blocky for now, so I think I'lll move stuff round again. Probably when the BV grows out some more.
Pic on 23/2/2026

Readings at this stage:
Potassium: 2.3ppm
Ammonia: 0.1ppm

reduce water changes to 2 times a week.

Welcome to ScapeCrunch, @sarvatma!
We would love to get to know you. Please tell us about yourself. What tank do you have?