# First high light planted tank.



## CraigThor (Aug 5, 2007)

First I'm new here and have only minor knowledge in plants in the aquarium. Here is what I'm working with:

150 gallon Tall 48x24x30 SA Tank
Larger CPR CR3000 Wet/Dry
4 150 watt MH 6500K fixtures
Sand subtrate will be changing that out later this week with EcoComplete and Florite Mix
3 EcoTech VorTech fans
1 Large Center Piece of Driftwood

Stocking is:

1 Cichla Mono
2 Cichla Intermedia
1 Crenicichla Venezuela
2 Ancestrius Albino Bristlenose pr.

I've contacted Rex Grigg about my CO2 needs just waiting for a reply. What is the best way to hook the CO2 up to my wet/Dry? Also looking for plant suggestions that would keep my tank in the SA theme. I've included a bunch of pictures of what I'm working with and could use any and all advice as I want this to be successful. You can really see the difference in my lighting from the earlier pics to the ones I took today with my new lights.

Craig


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## evercl92 (Aug 14, 2006)

First off, nice piece of driftwood. It complements the dimensions of your tank nicely. 
Flourite and Eco are expensive. Save money and go with Soil Master Select (www.lesko.com) or this here.

Is your wet/dry system completely enclosed? If not, you're probably going to run into the issue of outgassing your injected CO2 as it trickles through.


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## CraigThor (Aug 5, 2007)

evercl92 said:


> First off, nice piece of driftwood. It complements the dimensions of your tank nicely.
> Flourite and Eco are expensive. Save money and go with Soil Master Select (www.lesko.com) or this here.
> 
> Is your wet/dry system completely enclosed? If not, you're probably going to run into the issue of outgassing your injected CO2 as it trickles through.


Only about 6" of the top of my Wet/ Dry is open the rest is covered in plexi covers that came with it.

Craig


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## elaphe (Aug 24, 2006)

Nice start! Should be plenty of light for almost any plants you could want.


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

You are overdoing the light. You have 600 watts of light, very close to the water in a 150 gallon tank. Half of that amount of light would grow just about every plant you would want to try. Or, you could raise the lights another 10 inches or so above the water, live with the light spill-over, and have a more reasonable amount of light. Avoiding major algae outbreaks is going to be hard with the lights as they are.


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## Laith (Sep 4, 2004)

I agree with Hoppy about the light.

Even half the light will be too much until you get lots of plants in the tank and the CO2 going (and associated fert regime)...


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## cholly (Jun 12, 2007)

On the lights issue, I confess I'm wondering why you went with four halides. The conventional rule on a reef tank is one halide bulb for every two feet of tank length, which would be two in your case. Admittedly on a reef you'd probably be looking at 400w halides and not 150w because of the tank depth, but on a planted tank I should think 150s are fine even with that depth.

Even more though I'm wondering why you're using three Vortechs, each of which can put out 3,000 gph of flow. Putting aside that the MSRP for three of them is over $1000, I'm not sure why you'd need anywhere near 9,000 gph non-laminar flow in a planted tank. They're great pieces of equipment, I love mine - but it's in my reef. What's your rational with them? Are you running them cranked all the way up, or throttled back?


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## CraigThor (Aug 5, 2007)

cholly said:


> On the lights issue, I confess I'm wondering why you went with four halides. The conventional rule on a reef tank is one halide bulb for every two feet of tank length, which would be two in your case. Admittedly on a reef you'd probably be looking at 400w halides and not 150w because of the tank depth, but on a planted tank I should think 150s are fine even with that depth.
> 
> Even more though I'm wondering why you're using three Vortechs, each of which can put out 3,000 gph of flow. Putting aside that the MSRP for three of them is over $1000, I'm not sure why you'd need anywhere near 9,000 gph non-laminar flow in a planted tank. They're great pieces of equipment, I love mine - but it's in my reef. What's your rational with them? Are you running them cranked all the way up, or throttled back?


For the first question I'm running 4 of them as I want to get my timers set to run a sun up to sun down across the tank so only 1-2 will be on at a time. I've just been short on that this weekend as there was lots of family stuff going on.

I'm using the vortechs to keep my sand substrate clean as this originally was an African Cichlid tank and they were messy. They are now only running on there lowest setting and I will probably be removing 1-2 of them as I get the plants in. I love how little room they took compared to completely in tank pumps/ powerheads.

I hope to have my lights come on as the sun would pass but my initail setup of the timers was off and I ran out of time so I set them to come on at the same time.

I also got my regulator ordered.

Craig


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## CraigThor (Aug 5, 2007)

Got my timers figured out. 

Light one far left- 6:30-8:30am
Light two- 8:30-3:15
Light three- 11:00-5:30
Light four 5:30-8:00pm

As you can see there is about 4 hours of light overlap during the midday but will be less morning and night. My substrate will be here Weds. or Thurs. so I can get that going and I got my CO2 stuff coming in the next week. Thanks to Rex Griggs for the regulator/ bubble counter. I purchased the stuff to make my own CO2 Reactor 30-40" long out of 2" PVC. I'm going to be running approximately 700 gph through it so any idea on an overall length?

Thanks again.

Craig


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## CraigThor (Aug 5, 2007)

Bump, lots of pics to come later, got my substrate. Even with 1.5 hrs of washing my tank is still cloudy so hopefully I can get pics once I get home today.


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