I'm glad it worked for you. My dad told me about them and they are super easy to use by yourself and worth every penny.

Can you post a link of the electrical connection you need? I'll help ya and dig around a bit.

Menards, Home Depot, and Lowes don't have it. I may try the United Electric Supply but they have crazy hours.

Possibly radio shack?

Nope they didn't have them either. I gave up and ordered a few from the internet. I'll be adding the substrate tomorrow and messing with some driftwood arrangements. I found a few nice plant packages I grabbed that hopefully will be here by Friday so I can plant stuff.

Substrate added on Tuesday, plus I am soaking all of my driftwood in the tank. Since Aquasoil has lots of ammonium I am pretty much doing a fishless cycle on it's own - it is well over 5 ppm right now. I am taking lots of pictures but I don't have them available to post yet.

My new light sockets will arrive today, hopefully it will be easy to put those together because if not I am out a ton of cash.

I have 2 plant packages which should be here tonight or tomorrow. I do need to pick up some plant mass just to start out, I will probably run to somewhere close in the morning and buy up all of their stems if they are still alive. I tried Pet Land and they really don't have much for stems anymore just swords and crypts.

I should have started soaking my driftwood earlier because it might take 2 weeks to get it to sink and by then I will have lots of plants I need to stick in... Oh well.

PS You guys are boring, am I the only one who sits on a computer all day?

With the catfish in the above pic you will need lots of wood. Show us some pics.

What did you do with catfish? That's going to look great when you're done.

Planted everything yesterday... I think I counted 26 species and I ended up throwing lots of stems out that weren't perfect since I had so much. Tank is loaded with stems now.

Oh, and one of the ballasts on my light fixture blew out . I should have inspected the thing better before I bought it since it had the semi-melted connectors. Took one of my brand new GE 9325k lights with it too. I'm pretty mad about the whole thing, I just ordered an entire new fixture set then because a new ballast was like $70 and who knows if the other semi-melted one is gonna blow and if there is more salt water corrosion there. Lesson learned I guess. So I'm running 3x65 until my new fixture arrives. This will be good because the whole 3 lunar lights thing pissed me off, who puts a lunar light directly in the center, thats where the crossbar is on most tanks 48" wide, duh!! The new fixture has 4 and won't have that problem.

I got my CO2 indicator set up, it took like an hour to get an exactly 4 KH reference solution made. It seems to be working since it turned green this morning. No pearling yet...

pH has dropped to 5.9 with the Aquasoil buffer and the 30 ppm CO2.

Some species are doing better than others... The Blyxa is kinda tattered, I hope it pulls through but it keeps uprooting. I have like 5 species of mosses and some pellia waiting on the driftwood that is still soaking. About half of the pieces are sunk now. I may just hold out for another week to let the plants recover. My favorite is the P. Stellata it is very colorful.

Some of the plants going in.


It was much easier to plant with water this low. Some of the more rigid stems didn't work out since they wouldn't really bend in the water.


Mostly planted... I think about 10 minutes after I took this picture and filled the tank back up, another package of plants arrived with the mail... doh!


3 days later... some plants perking back up nicely.


A bunch of different stuff in this picture. I have a ton of cabomba, I had some yellowish in my other tank plus supposedly green and purple from the store. It is hard to tell the difference since it loses it's color fast. The P. stellata is the tallest plant in the back, this picture doesn't do it justice.


Other side of the tank. The stuff in the back corner is E. Tellanus or something , I guess it is kinda pricey but I got it as a freebie in a trade.


Closeup of HC (This stuff is tiny!) and Aquasoil


Co2 indicator. If there is enough CO2 (30 ppm) it will be green. To little, blue, too much, yellow.


Maybe next weekend I will put in the driftwood. I have so many different kinds of moss I have no idea which is which so I will just tie some of each to a branch and see what happems.

OUtstanding progress and nice pics. Thanks for the tip on the SAE. I went and got some.
mike

Now that tank is starting to look very nice Cant wait for the next batch of pics

Well here is my tank a week ago


Apparently I wasn't supposed to dose ferts out of the gate and run all my lights... oops!

So I now have a huge mass of hornwart and anacharis in the tank soaking up all the extra nutrients. It seems to have worked and the algae isn't insane like this anymore.

I am putting in the driftwood today. It has been soaking in the bathroom for 3 weeks so most of it will hopefully sink. I will have plenty left over so expect a post in the for sale section once I am content with my design.

So far to help with the algae I have 6 Otos, 2 SAE, about 10 Cherry shrimp and 2 Amano shrimp.

Oh and as far as centerpiece fish, I just pulled the trigger on a bunch of Apistogramma.

Apisto Trifesciata

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Apisto Cacatuoides 'Sunburst'

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Apistogramma agassizi 'Double Red'

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Should be here Tuesday. I need to run to a garden center and get some clay pots for them and to cut some openings.