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THE official "what did you do to your tank(s) today" thread!​

Let's keep it real by sharing our daily routine. Post daily if you want. It's nice to check in with fellow aquatic gardeners.

Does anyone know how a chiller should be connected? Do I need to buy a separate external pump, or can it be connected directly to a canister filter?

I’m looking for a dual-stage CO₂ regulator compatible with M10x1 disposable CO₂ cylinders. Does anyone know a model that can deliver more than 2 bar of working pressure, preferably 3 bar or higher?

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.

Several members of this forum have greatly contributed to testing the concept of Horizontal CO2 Reactor , and I am so happy that collectively we have succeeded to push some true innovation. @Unexpected successfully pioneered the first horizontal reactor on his bigger tank, was kind enough to call it ‘Yugang reactor’ and inspired several followers with that. Also to mention @RickyV who took CO2 injection to a new level with a 1000-gallon system, achieving a 1.0 pH drop in just 38 minutes. Thank you to all who have contributed, and I believe hobbyist will find most answers in the Horizontal CO2 Reactor thread on this forum and hopefully feel that CO2 is easier than it used to be with bubble reactors.

My journey started about 2 years ago, when I was doing some measurements and calculations on my bubble reactor and got to the idea of the CO2 Spray Bar. I built probably 10 versions / prototypes of CO2 Spray Bar, spent many days measuring pH profiles, so that I could share my insights with the community on UKAPS. The horizontal reactor is based on the physics principles of the CO2 Spray Bar, and test results are applicable to both. I was at the time so happy with my CO2 Spray Bar that I gave no priority to building the horizontal reactor and thanks again to @Unexpected for his initiative and courage. I am currently also using the horizontal reactor, but my love and in certain situations preference for CO2 Spray Bar remains.

I discovered this morning that both threads on CO2 Spray Bar and Horizontal CO2 reactor have now been removed by the UKAPS admins. This may have happened in the past few weeks, not sure as I am not a regular UKAPS visitor anymore. These threads represent probably several hundred hours work, aiming to be a lasting and valuable contribution to the hobby, lots of measurement data, comparisons and calculations, and many pages of posts from fellow hobbyists. Even posts in several journals featuring the CO2 Spray Bar or Horizontal Reactor have been deleted or edited by admins. Thumbs up to forum rules, but very few will disagree that these all stand or fall with forum governance and integrity to individual members as well as the community.

While having the Horizontal CO2 Reactor now well documented on this forum, I believe it is a loss for the hobby if we would lose the insights on CO2 Spray Bar. It offers the same performance as the Horizontal CO2 Reactor, can be made for perhaps 5-10 USD and one hour DIY work. When I have more time I may create a new thread on this forum, with similar detail as what was deleted in UKAPS, with various prototypes and measurements. For now I hope it is useful if I just post a quick summary.

The first prototype CO2 Spray Bar, as I was testing late 2021 / early 2022.









The CO2 Spray Bar in the front of the tank, was in my tank barely visible. In my 200 liter tank I used a transparent half pipe, and achieved 1.5 pH drop with very good stability. It is from the experiments with the Spray Bar that I took the 17.7 ratio for the calculation of Horizontal Reactor dimension.

Some forum members pushed back on the idea having anything in the front, so I started experimenting with CO2 Spray Bar in the back of the tank.





I hope the above pictures help to understand the CO2 Spray Bar, and perhaps inspire fellow hobbyists to try it in their tanks. Having a simple half-pipe in a tank is easier than building an inline horizontal CO2 reactor, and may be especially attractive for small tanks.

For any further questions or help, please post below or send me an PM. I may start a more detailed thread when I have a bit more time and/or see there is interest from fellow hobbyists.

Thank you for reading, and thank you to ScapeCrunch for giving us a good home for our hobby.

I have rarely kept journals for my tanks, mostly because I tend to not think about it until it’s too late. I have missed the jump on this one too, but as it has only been running for 2-3 months now I think it’s newish enough to start a journal.
Tank:
80cm x 45cm x 40cm (32” x 18” x 16”)
About 130L of water, or 34 US gallons.

I upgraded from a 60L tank that had been running for about 7 years, fairly steadily. I have always enjoyed smaller tanks and so kept this upgrade fairly modest.

Here is a picture of the tank as it is today:





As you can see, I suffer from collectoritis, and have definitely prioritised lots of plant species over ‘scaping’. One of the joys for me in this hobby is growing lots of different plants, so I tend to end up with jungles with many different stems.

The tank is just beginning to stabilise now, with the fresh soil finally not messing around with the water parameters so violently.
I use remineralised RO water cut slightly with tap water at the moment, as I find that ‘matures’ the soil faster in the beginning of a tank.
Below is the running sheet for this tank, which gives a good idea of the water parameters.

Skip to the actual journal here.

I'm known here for high tech, high nutrient, inert substrate scapes -- but I also love NO tech, rich substrate scapes, too!

This thread is three-sided:

1. To act as a journal for my new No-Tech bowl scape, and
2. To act as a discussion board for no/low tech bowl scapes, and
3. To collect and share accounts and examples of bowl scapes from around the world!

Fishbowls were the OG aquarium, until the hobby helped eliminate them from modern aquarium keeping -- for good reason! Traditional fish bowls were used to house medium-large tropical fish like Bettas in a cramped, unfiltered space, with clown-puke gravel and little to no proper cycling/care/husbandry. We're glad THOSE bowls are gone.

But there is a new modern kind of fish bowl, one where plants, substrate, bacteria, water changes, and proper inhabitant selection all work together to create healthy, mini ecosystem-worlds in our homes:

What does No Tech mean?​

In general, it means that these scapes have:

• No Filter
• No Heater
• No Air Pump
• No Skimmer
• No CO2
• No Circulation

They do have:

• A Light (usually low to medium-powered)
• A Substrate (inert, aquasoil, or sand-capped soil like Walstad method)
• Plants (usually quite low-tech plants, though a surprising number will thrive in this method!)
• Inhabitants (Since these bowls are usually between 2-12 gallons on average, this limits selection to nano fish, shrimp, and snails).

Don't get caught up in the specific label of "no tech" (or worse, gatekeep this method). If you want to use a small filter, or a heater, do it! The concept is still generally the same.

The point is, these are smaller, affordable, beautiful little worlds of light to enliven our living spaces and create art, nature, and beauty -- often with very little maintenance and upkeep besides a partial water change and feeding the fish.

Gallery and Links to bowl scapers:​

I'm thinking about setting up a carnivorous plant terrarium. I'm looking for a place to go like Scape Crunch to ask a few questions. My experience with aquarium forums has me leery of where I go for info. FaceBook is a storm. Reddit is slightly better. There are a couple forums, but I don't want to end up in a Planted Tank type situation where the wrong question gets me banned. Any suggestions?

FWIW: I've grown carnivorous plants in the past and had good luck with them. However, from what I can find, doing a terrarium might have a few different rules than just a fun pot garden outside.

I am anticipating setting up and planting a new tank in two weeks. This will be my second planted tank, but the first is only around a 6gallon display. I am still learning with most coming from internet searches and videos.

1) Referring to stem plants, when I watch videos of tank plantings the plants are always small. Just a few inches. The plants that have been shipped to me, or I see in stores, are always larger close to full grown. I know some are using tissue cultures but event those who are not the plants seem very small. The plants that are shipped to me, should I cut them down first before planting? My plan includes possibly Rotala Florida, Rotala wallichii, Rotala OJ, Rotala Macandra green/pink. I will most likely be ordering from Buceplant.

2) I have some Hygrophila Corymbosa compact that I really like. I want to plant them in the new tank. To do this, should these be trimmed down, trim some of the longer roots, or just plant as is? I am finding different advice online. Opinions welcomed.

About me:
I've been keeping planted aquariums and shrimp breeding tanks for almost a decade and for the majority of that time aquariums were my primary hobby. In 2021 I had ~30 tanks running simultaneously containing almost 200 types of plants that I had collected over a 5 year period and more than a dozen types of shrimp. In this time, it was harder for me to not setup new tanks than it was to grow any aquatic plant sent my way. Below are some of the tanks I've kept over the years.






At the end of 2021 I moved from Texas to Massachusetts and gave away all of my plants, tanks, and shrimp to friends I had made over the years. It took some time to find a permanent place to live so I didn't have any tanks until I was unexpectedly given an ADA 120P in summer of 2023.

The early days of the 120P:
I went through the typical tank start growing pains with a diatoms phase, green hair algae, and every other issue one would expect from a new tank. Even with the new tank difficulties, it only took me 2 months to get to a healthy tank again. For the next 1.5 years, everything went smoothly and the tank went through many iterations.

Setup on June 28th

Diatoms outbreak on July 19th

Green hair algae outbreak by August 18th

Everything was cleaned up and growing great by September 1st

The start of the disaster:
In February 2025, I started running into issues. BBA started growing in small tufts on the substrate and green hair algae started attacking the old growth on the plants. I'd run into this issue in the past and was usually able to fix it pretty quickly by dialing in the CO2, cleaning the substrate, cleaning filters, and replanting only the most healthy tops of the plants. Even after doing this multiple times, I haven't had any luck fixing the algae. It always comes back


The start of the algae

Multiple trim and replant cycles along with some new plants

Relatively clean after a trim and replant cycle

10 days later

Where I am today:
I'm getting so frustrated by the persistent issues that I'm about ready to shut down this tank. As a last ditch effort, I purchased a pack of healthy plants from Burr740 to see if healthy plants can help me get through the algae phase and get back into a good place.

The tank as of January 2nd 2026. The healthiest plants in the tank were received earlier this week from Burr740.

Really poor color on my plants with a lot of green algae on the lower leaves. The nice looking bacopa is from Burr740. The original stems of Bacopa have barely grown in the last month. If I pull them up, there are very few roots.

Another example of the old growth issues. The Limnophila mini vietnam also has not grown at all in the last month. Lots of algae grows on the substrate as well.

Another comparison of Burr's Ludwigia sp. red vs mine. Very slow growth and poor rooting.

Really weak older growth on Rotala sp. singapore and poor coloration compared to Burr's plants. This plant has always been very easy for me to keep and this is part of why I'm thinking there is something big that I'm missing. Didiplis diandra is another easy plant that keeps melting at the base and its making very little progress because of this.


Below is the key information about the tank.
Tank size: ADA 120P (120 cm x 45 cm x 45 cm)
Lighting: 3x NiloCG Prizms ran at the lowest setting for each channel. Lights are on for 7 hours a day. I want to increase the lighting, but any time I do the algae gets significantly worse
Filtration: Oase Biomaster 600 and a SunSun HW-303B. There's a spraybar on the bottom left that points along the length of the tank at substrate level and the other output is on the top right corner of the tank pushing the opposite direction.
CO2: Vertical reactor on the SunSun filter and a Sera reactor on the Oase. CO2 comes on 4 hours before lights on and turns off 1 hr before lights off. Drop checker is yellow when lights turn on. The pH drop is ~1.4-1.5 at lights on (5.8 at lights on and 7.3 when water is fully degassed). Plants start pearling within 10 minutes of the lights coming on.
Substrate: A mix of ADA aquasoil, Fluval stratum, and Controsoil. A bag of Controsoil was added ~2 months ago to try and give the plants a boost. The remaining substrate is from when I setup the tank and is almost certainly not providing much nutrition or buffering capacity.
Water change schedule: Weekly 70-80% water changes with tap water coming from the MWRA (water report here). KH is ~2. GH is less than 1(3.7 PPM Ca, 0.7 PPM Mg based on the report). Water is treated with sodium carbonate at the water treatment plant to increase the pH to ~9.2, but the pH rapidly decreases after the water comes out of the tap. One potential issue is the tap water is extremely cold. It comes out at ~50F and I add a mix of water from the tap along with heated water. The temperature drops to ~60F for 2-3 hours whenever I water change. I don't keep any livestock so I'm not sure if this is a problem. This was not something I needed to consider back in Texas.
Remineralization: I add 22 PPM calcium and 6 PPM magnesium at water change
Fertilization: 20N-6P-26K is added immediately after water change. A second dose at 10N-3P-13K is added halfway through the week. Micros are Burr740's most recent recipe dosed at 0.15 PPM Fe 3x per week.
Temperature: Tank is heated to 73F during the winter. During the more mild parts of the year I remove the heater and go with whatever the ambient temperature is.

It looks like I'm doing everything right on paper and based on my past experience keeping tanks, but there is clearly some major issue ongoing. Right now I'm thinking its inconsistency in the CO2 that I'm just not seeing (I just started the CO2 2 hours earlier last week because I was noticing the drop checker wasn't always yellow at lights on), not enough light, or too cold of water during water changes. I want to keep some records through this journal to keep myself engaged with the tank and to make sure I'm being consistent with everything. I'm also hoping some additional eyes can help me see where I'm going wrong because I really, really miss having a nice looking tank.