# First tank & El Natural questions



## Siberian (Jan 16, 2011)

I've just setup a new tank and I have a couple of concerns regarding lighting.

I live in Michigan so for a good portion of the year cloud cover prevents there from being much in the way of direct sunlight. In addition my house is very heavily shaded so in the summer time there is very little direct sunlight. So honestly placing the tank in front of a window to get 'sun' really isn't that viable. I have a terrible time growing basic house plants due to a lack of sunlight.

So, I didn't even bother to try finding a window to place the tank in, which means even though it's "natural" I'm going to need to get by with artificial lighting.

I'm also interested in not heating the tank, so I'm choosing fish/plants that will survive in water that is in the lower 60s (sometimes into the upper 50s  ) to low 70s (my house rarely gets above 75-76 degrees in the summer due to amount of shade trees). So, because of that it will be a rather different tank I think from most typical ones that seem to be tropical (at least based one what I've experienced asking for plants that like those water temps around town).

So... all that being said this is what I've done so far.

I picked up a used 50g tank off Craiglist for $100. Dimensions: 48 1/4"L x 12 3/4"W x 20"H Owner had a Rena XP2 (300 gph) canister filter included in the deal. I suspect this is somewhat of an overkill for what I'm trying to do here, but maybe not.

I live about 400 yards back from a lake in Michigan and across the street is a wet lands, water table is fairly high here and most of the topsoil is very rich and formerly sediment. I went out and did a bit of digging in that frozen ground and got about 8 gallons or so worth of dirt. I put it into a large plastic tub, filled it part way with water, skimmed what floated to the top, let it soak for a while, drained it and repeated that process about 3-4x. Dirt spent a good week under water with 3-4 cycles of draining and picking up floating matter from the surface.

My water is pretty hard and has no water softener. Has a bit of iron in it and quite a high degree of calcium. So, I did not add any crushed coral/etc to the substrate, just added the dirt directly to the tank without modification. It's covered in an inch or so of gravel now. There is a good 1 - 1-1/2 of soil under the gravel.


Initial water test in the tank showed a PH of around 7.5. It's climbed over the first 4 days to around 8 and seems to be holding steady there. (API Master Test Kit).
Ammonia was 0 initially and has never been higher then .25ppm (4 days so far). 
Nitrate/Nitrite has been zero the whole time.

I went around town last weekend and stopped at a few LFS and bought whatever plants they thought would survive in colder water. Probably spent about $20 in total on them, so I have a nice variety of 'test' subjects. Sadly, I should have noted the names of them and will now have to spend time identifying what it is I got. But I don't have a terribly high amount invested in them (imo) if things go sideways.

I also put 2 dozen "feeder" white cloud minnows in the tank to make sure the previous owner hadn't done something horrible like clean it out with soap or something. They're cold water tolerate and according to what I've read do fine down to 41F degrees. After 4 days they seem fine and none have died. Figured they would be a cheap way ($2 for 24  ) to make sure the tank wasn't a complete deathtrap.

As far as chemicals added to the tank, it came with all kinds of stuff the previous owner had. All I've added of what was there was a small amount of what on the bottle described itself as designed to get the initial tank bacteria started and a small amount of the initial tank salt. I ran the filter for the first couple of days to help knock down the cloudiness my playing w/ plants on saturday introduced. On the advice I saw here I'm giving it a try w/ it off now. It has a bit of cloudiness still, but you can see all the way through the tank the long way which you couldn't this weekend. 

My long term goal is to keep a couple of fancy goldfish in here since they are okay in cooler water, though I realize that is a challenge with plants. I'm planning to let the plants get established for a couple of months before introducing the plant destroying terrors to the tank. I'm planning on 2-3 though leaning towards just 2 so that I can put a few other things in with them w/o having too high of an amount of fish in the tank. I will be leaving at least some of the white cloud mountain minnows in the tank with them and possibly adding some sort of algae eating critter or colder water barbs.

My main concern however at this point is that I'm drastically to low on lighting. As I said above even at the best of times my house is not exactly a sunny place. With all the trees in the summer and all the clouds in West Michigan in the winter, sunlight isn't exactly abundant. But, I'm afraid now I may be way under lighting the tank with the artificial light I have.

I have just 2 'aquarium/plant' bulbs from home depot in the stock hood the tank came with. 15w each florescent tube lights. Which by the watts per gallon figure discussed elsewhere makes this some kind of extremely low light tank (0.6 wpg), particularly since it's taller then it is deep which now I understand makes brighter light even more important... ?

I have them on a timer right now running about 10 hours of the day (figure since the light is low longer = helpful? ).

I'm curious what folks here think I should be doing in regards to that and if there is anything else I've done so far that seems like a bad idea. I think it's pretty clear that I'm underpowered on light from what I've read but so much of that advice I've seen is geared towards high-tech setups with CO2 and the like. So I don't really want to go overboard and end up w/ it being too much light and causing me other problems but I also don't want to be so poorly lit that nothing grows at all (I have enough problems w/ that when it comes to house plants already!  )


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## Michael (Jul 20, 2010)

Everything sounds good so far, with two exceptions:

As you already know, your light is not sufficient. Look at this discussion, http://www.plantedtank.net/forums/lighting/105774-par-vs-distance-t5-t12-pc.html The second chart in the first post will help decide what type of light to get. For this type of tank, you want low to medium light.

Keep the filter. Many of us believe that good water flow is important for success. Your goldfish will produce much more ammonia than typical "tropical" fish, so you need the added biofiltration. Use primarily bio-media in the filter, don't worry about carbon or lots of mechanical filtration. For an incredibly detailed, passionate, and LONG discussion on filtration, see http://www.aquaticplantcentral.com/...club/75400-excited-word-about-filtration.html

Good luck! Your plan of letting the plants settle in for several months before adding the goldfish is excellent. I bet you wind up keeping all those WCMMs--they are cool little fish, and will get along with your goldfish.


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## Diana K (Dec 20, 2007)

I would skip the salt. Fresh water tanks do not need sodium chloride.

The bacterial starter is probably a waste of time. Since you have it, go ahead and use it up, just do not buy more. 
The right bacteria is in the genus Nitrospiros. All other additives do not have the right species of bacteria. 
There is probably the right species of bacteria in the soil you added. They grow pretty much anywhere there is water, oxygen and ammonia.

Lighting: I would double what you have. I run the 4' long fluorescent bulbs from hardware stores over most of my tanks, and I get one that is plant specific, and another that is Cool White, or Daylight. Your tank (I have one that shape, too) is really hard to arrange the lights over, it is so narrow. You need the maximum light with the least amount of fixture. A narrow design, 2 bulb fixture that holds T-8 bulbs works well for me. 2 bulbs at 32 watts (I think those bulbs are 32 watts each) is over 1 wpg.
The plant bulbs are good for plants, but do not have all the wavelengths that we see really well, so orange fish look pretty bad. 
The Daylight bulbs go a long way to make the orange fish look natural.

Other cool water plants will probably be found in a pond store.

Here are some other fish that are cool water, but research to be sure:
Look into some of the Barbs, like the Gold Barb _Puntius semifasciolatus_ (couple of color morphs). Smaller than a Gold, tolerant of cooler water than most tropical fish (though I do not know about into the low 60s)
_Puntius ticto_
Rosy Barb, _P. conchonius_ (Good substitute for the fancy golds- there is a long finned form that is really nice). May nip plants, but probably won't be that much of a problem. 
Red Line Barb
Weather Loaches
Certain Catfish (look them up at Planet Catfish, then use a feature that finds more fish with similar requirements)
Pepper Cories (_C. paleatus_) Some Cories handle cooler water than Peppers, too. 
Spotted Doradid (_Agamyxis pectinifrons_)
Zebra Danio


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## Tuiflies (Jan 21, 2010)

If you're looking for a cheap mod for your existing hood, try this. I lined it with tin tape and managed to get four sockets over my 29G (which is only 30" long). I fit two 26W and two 13W bulbs in it, so you could easily fit 4 (or more) 26W bulbs in yours. That would give you 104W over your 55G tank (based on the dimensions) would be just under 2WPG. I like it because it's cheap and very adjustable. I have two 4000k bulbs and two 6500K so I get good spectrum coverage as well.


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## Siberian (Jan 16, 2011)

Tuiflies said:


> If you're looking for a cheap mod for your existing hood, try this.


Not bad, but the hood on my used tank is in pretty rough shape as it is, so I'm not terribly sad to see it go. I have a 2x T5HO fixture on the way to solve the lighting issue on this tank since it looks like based on the chart in that lighting thread (thanks for the link!) I should be able to use that and adjust it up and down to get whatever level of lighting I want in this tank from high to low. Looked to me like that would be the most flexible setup.

I also opened up the filter last night and ditched the bag of carbon that was in it and replace it with a bit more bio-filter media.

Diana, I didn't have much of the bacteria starter, the guy who sold me the tank & filter threw in his box of chemicals. Mostly a bunch of algae control stuff, some stuff for treating angelfish, the salt, declorinators, etc. All crap I really don't need but it's not like I really paid for it.

Thanks to everyone for the advice.


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