Help Planning a planted tank, would love some advice!

[Koan]

Aquatic plants in planter boxes in an aquarium

That's definitely a work in progress lol, first thing I learned is you need to be sure the grain of your Aquasoil is fine enough if you're going to have small planters, because there's not as much room to move around to get the roots to seat. At first used Aqua soil with way too big a kernel size, what a pain.

I will say the mystery snails absolutely love those flat sides to scour for algae. They're made of roofing slates, a guy on Etsy makes them custom, any way you like.

Idea was for it to be a farm tank, which it sort of is.. but I'm having more or less endless ongoing summer issues with everything mechanical from regulators to replacement CO2 bottles to lights to electronic timers just letting everything coast right now until later in the summer when I have recovered some patience

 

[SpookySparkle]

Well there's a big difference between a canister filter and a hang-on filter. The hang on filter sits above the water line, which means that unless it's specifically designed to self-prime (Seachem Tidal) , as soon as the power goes out all the water falls out. It can't restart its own siphon, you have to come back and pour water into it to restart it.

Canister filter is a closed system, soon as the power comes back on it will just start pumping again. Now for very long power outages, days not hours, your denitrifying bacterial colony will lose oxygen in that canister and die, but that's a different issue. That's much more a concern for a fish-only tank than for a planted tank, which has as much or more bacterial mass in the tank itself than in the canister.

Yeah, that's a good point in the plants supporting the bacteria for the tank- I suppose the sponge for the sponge filter would just be a useful thing for if I have to plunk a fish in quarantine in that case.