Journal 1000 Gallon High Tech Planted Tank

[RickyV]

Tank update 8/25/24
For the most part everything in the tank is doing pretty well. I decided to try my first more difficult/rare plants now that I feel more confident with the easy stuff. I added some ludwigia white and hygrophila araguai chai. The ludwigia white exploded in size. It's probably 5x the size in width/height of the ones I have home. The Chai looking the same as expected with its slow growth.
The shrimp colony in the breeding tank has been thriving, though unfortunately some bladderwort took over all the moss. Does anyone know if it can eat shrimplets? I am also seeing more and more shrimps in the main display.

The past few weeks I've been experimenting with 0 NO3 dosing, and PO4 reduced to 0.5 ppm weekly. Plants all doing well still. The red root floaters suggest there is plenty of nitrogen in the water. According to tests the nitrate level sits around 1-1.3. I wonder if the plants are getting most of their nitrogen from ammonia, or if the fish are able to provide the plants with a steady but low level of nitrate.
Emersed plants growing like crazy. Unfortunately got a scales infestation on them. Anyone have suggestions on treating this with an aquarium right under them? I've been spraying them with isopropyl alcohol, but It would be nice to know what is the safe dose that can fall in the tank.
They're growing all the way up even to the darkest areas. But then they see there is no light and consume their leaf.


The only thing I've been unhappy with is the ludwigia super red bush. I keep having big chunks uproot, or maybe have the stems snap in half. So I keep having to redo the bush. I haven't been able to grow the bush to my final vision because of this. You can see in this picture how is not all connected because of it. I'm hoping once I get the aquasoil it will help them root better.
Here is a full tank pic during sunrise before trimming.
Most recent full tank pic.

 

[Burr740]

Just continues to be amazing. All that above water and the floater bin is very cool too. The lower stem issues are probably the low no3 youre experimenting with, its definitely not going to help it

 

[Art]

@RickyV you've given me another bookmark to have to come back to. Well done but need more time to digest and study your pictures!

 

[justinstewart]

@RickyV how is this tank doing?

I remember reading your post about co2 on another forum months ago. I think it was the first time I had heard about the Yugang reactor . I tried looking for that post again to see how it was going, but never found it.

Just read the whole journal, the tank looks awesome. Thanks for sharing!

 

[RickyV]

@RickyV how is this tank doing?

I remember reading your post about co2 on another forum months ago. I think it was the first time I had heard about the Yugang reactor. I tried looking for that post again to see how it was going, but never found it.

Just read the whole journal, the tank looks awesome. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks! The tank is doing well, only thing Is my java ferns/anubias are starting to get way too big. I just need to figure out how to best thin them out. I didn't make a great cosmetic sand barrier in the beggining so I am currently dealing with the aftermath of that. Its just hard to fix with the tank being so deep. Also added some aquasoil to the top section recently, to hopefully help with poor plant rooting, and mostly to reduce my pH. I'll post a longer update this next weekend I see the tank.

 

[RickyV]

Teaser...

So this has taken a lot longer than expected but it is finally ready! This tank now has 24/7 livestream! Here is the link to the stream Underwater Rainforest
The main lights are on from 7am - 7pm CST/ 8am - 8pm EST/ 5am - 5pm PT. The tank has a night light but currently it is not great so I will be trying to improve that. For those interested in seeing live tank maintenance, that is on Fridays usually starting around 8am CST/9am EST/ 2pm BST. I usually spend a few hours on maintenance but it varies.

The tank has been doing well recently. A few weeks ago I added 50L of UNS controsoil to help with the poor plant rooting, and also with reducing the pH. I need to take more measurements, but the KH is now at most 1.5 DHK. The degassed pH went down from 7.8 to 7.5. I have 50L more of aquasoil on the way. Though I may end up adding most of it inside the hollow rock structures since the slope is already pretty steep.

I did have a close call with CO2 recently. CO2 started leaking out of the main nut and I over 24 hours the pH went from 6.7 to 5.8, around a 1.7 pH drop. I heard fish were doing well though. The pH controller is set to stop CO2 injection at 6.1 pH. The Yugang reactor is also built to overflow its CO2 after it reaches its maximum capacity. The best explanation I have for the large pH drop despite my failsafe is a significant amount of CO2 must have accumulated in the small room and dissolved in the tank.

I did not do a great job in the beginning with my cosmetic sand barrier so I have recently been struggling with substrate coming to the front. Not sure how to best address it since the tank is so deep. The space is also a bit tight for a diver to go in with all the plants. Best solution I could think of is just removing as much of the substrate right behind the rock barrier since all the plants there are epiphytes rooted in lava rock anyways. I also dumped some more lava rock right behind the rock barrier to slow down the substrate shifting down. I guess worst case scenario I may replace the cosmetic sand with a carpet.


My ludwigia white was not was not growing well so I removed it. But the ludwigia inclinata cuba has been doing well.


Java fern bush has been doing a little too well... I am going to start slowly thinning it to keep it from consuming the whole tank lol.


Here is how big the leaves on that centerpiece sword get.


By the way anyone know what kind of sword it is? I totally forgot what all swords we got. Here are some of its babies I have been growing in the shrimp breeding tank.


Shrimp breeding tank has slowed down in production, not sure if its because of all the bladderwort in there, or because planaria have returned to the tank.


Here is a short video of shrimps in the tank. Some of them are huge and so bright red. Anyone know what cherry shrimp variety these are? They were sold as bloody mary, but they look closer to fire reds to me.

The Siamese algae eaters have also gotten massive. They are almost double the size of the ones I keep at home. Not sure if its because of how big the tank is, or because the large quantity and quality of food here (lots of frozen/live foods). Here is a clip of them.

Emersed plants have been doing very well. It is crazy how much vines they send out in all directions searching for light. Some of them are very thick too. As you can see my duckweed index container has a bit of a duckweed problem...


Some of these emersed plants are also sending out some long roots reaching towards the substrate.


I tried setting up a daphnia culture, but I overfed them one day and crashed them overnight... Lucky have a backup at home now so I will give them a try again soon. The ones at home currently are connected to my pond so they essentially get a 100% WC every day with pond water, I am curious if that would work well with this tank. But this tank has much better mechanical filtration than my pond.


I did setup another culture that has been doing really well. Blackworms! I have them in these two tubs here connected to flow from the tank. I don't think this is the best setup for automatic segmentation, but I have found it easy to manually segment them once a week when they all gather around the algae wafers. May be a dumb question but does anyone know of anything that can kill planaria, but leave the blackworms alive? Video of the blackworms.

I have also found at least two juvenile fish in the tank that survived being fry on their own. One is the CPD and the other is a Corydoras.


Baby fish that I found and separated are also doing well. Currently have 5 CPDs and 2 Gertrude rainbowfish.

Here is a most recent full tank shot. I have been working on regrowing the ludwigia super red bush after adding the aquasoil. But I now have to rethink the height/shape of the bush in a way that wont block the camera view too much.

 

[justinstewart]

That sword leaf is massive! I bet those java ferns look so cool. Can't wait to check out the tank cam tomorrow when the lights are on. Thanks for the update!

 

[rzn7z7]

The tank looks great but gotta' ask....what happened with the pencilfish?

 

[RickyV]

The tank looks great but gotta' ask....what happened with the pencilfish?

The majority of the pencilfish were added to the tank. Unfortunately though the day before they were added they began to die despite being cleared of any pathogens by the veterinarian. I slowly stopped seeing them in the tank. I did some research and found this paper listing pencilfish as being sensitive to fenbendazole Morbidity and Mortality Associated with Fenbendazole Use in Teleost Fish at the National Aquarium, Baltimore - IAAAM 2012 - VIN. Jay Hemdal from reef2reef has mentioned he has lost a group of flashlight fish and darters over a couple days to this medication Fenbendazole. Ours were treated with fenbendazole the days prior and matched all the symptoms. I really wish we had found this information sooner.

There are still likely a few dozen pencilfish in the tank, I see them from time to time on the camera. Some were isolated and are doing very well so hopefully we can get them to spawn.

 

[RickyV]

Right when i just clicked on the stream a pencilfish was exploring the camera!

 

[*Ci*]

The live feed is awesome! It would neat if you could pull the camera back to get more of a full tank shot.

 

[Unexpected]

The live feed is awesome! It would neat if you could pull the camera back to get more of a full tank shot.

I second this, I want the full awesome of this tank. In 4k also

 

[Sean Riva]

Perhaps visitors to a public aquarium expect to be presented animals, like it being under water zoo. So they may look for the most exciting experiences, the large predators (sharks, stingray, etc) and most colourful (marine fish and corals), and this seems a reasonable staring point for a day out with the kids. Many of these "zoo" visitors may not be programmed during that day to go and see a planted tank like @RickyV 's, or appreciate that this is a stunning tank.

When checking out hobbies in the US, as many as 23% of respondents are into gardening and plants. Let's say 50 million people in the US alone. One could argue that planted tanks are the solution for those who don't have the space for a garden or greenhouse, don't have the warm climate, or don't have the stamina and time. But how many gardeners ever think of an aquarium as a solution for them, rather than dismissing it (consciously or unconsciously) as a small pool for keeping pets?

For our hobby we may want a display at a botanic garden (or a featured article in a magazine for gardeners, or bonsai lovers), where visitors expect to see plants and gardens. Some of them may be inspired by the slightly unconventional idea of an underwater garden, that is not primarily for keeping pets?

View attachment 5249

Most popular hobbies & activities in the U.S. 2025| Statista

****************** and ****** are the top two answers among U.S.

www.statista.com

Add pets and gardening and boom!

 

[RickyV]

I second this, I want the full awesome of this tank. In 4k also

Unfortunately it was the best angle I could come up with while also hiding the camera. But the quality should look look much better now. The bitrate was really off for some reason causing the stream to pixelate. Underwater Rainforest I tried increasing quality to 2K but then it would take a while to load (edit: I increased quality to 5MP and reduced FPS to fix long load time).

 

[Art]

I did not do a great job in the beginning with my cosmetic sand barrier so I have recently been struggling with substrate coming to the front. Not sure how to best address it since the tank is so deep. The space is also a bit tight for a diver to go in with all the plants. Best solution I could think of is just removing as much of the substrate right behind the rock barrier since all the plants there are epiphytes rooted in lava rock anyways. I also dumped some more lava rock right behind the rock barrier to slow down the substrate shifting down. I guess worst case scenario I may replace the cosmetic sand with a carpet.

Have you tried picking up the aqua soil using a magnet?

 

[RickyV]

Have you tried picking up the aqua soil using a magnet?

I did not realize aquasoil was magnetic! I just tried using the big magfloat magnet and it worked great! Thanks for the tip!

 

[Count Krunk]

Awesome setup you created!

The blackworm culture is very impressive.

 

[RickyV]

The blackworm culture is very impressive.

Yeah the culture has actually grown a bit since that video! This is today.
Just need to find space for a larger tub.

 

[Count Krunk]

Do you mind explaining your culture setup?

 

[Yugang]

Do you mind explaining your culture setup?

As far as possible from his wife