Looking at my blog’s visitor long, quite many people visiting the entries of planted aquarium set up. Browsing back those entries just bring back the joy that I have during the glory time of my aquarium hobby. Frankly speaking, that hobby of mine is slowly dying. From 3 aquariums that I have at home, now only 1 left, and it’s not planted at all.

Well, I have another aquarium at office. All I do is just to do water change every 2 week. Luckily the fishes survived. But, reading back the entries that I mentioned above somehow gives me some strength back, that it’s time to repeat the glory.

So after a quick visit to Pets Wonderland at Mid Valley yesterday, behold, the aquarium at my office comes alive again.

Going to buy a few more fishes this afternoon, especially those algae eater type. Otocinclus is what I have in mind now.

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With me switching my interest to cats, maybe there are some who is wondering what’s with my aquarium hobby? Well. It’s still my hobby. I’m not switching my hobby to cats, but instead I add my cats hobby alongside to my aquarium hobby.

In the past, I’ve been experimenting with injecting CO2 into planted aquarium, using a cheap method of fermentation (or is it?). It will be cheap is the yeast mixture is DIY (buying own sugar, yeast and soda bicarbonate). But if I’d like to use the off the counter refill, it easily costs RM13 per refill. And the CO2 supply is good for 3 weeks, but the bubble rate is really slow towards the end.

My bigger scale of planted aquarium project is still not yet started. I did blog about the equipment gathering before. Even the empty aquarium is there already, which Oyen use as his nap spot.

Well. It’s time to get started with this, but I rather start after I have gathered all the necessary items. So, my next thing that I gather is pressurize CO2 system. And as usual, the photo of my shopping list.

The first thing is this CO2 cylinder – 1 litre capacity. Well, can’t afford to get bigger cylinder, also if I get bigger, harder later to hide away the cylinder. The bad thing of not getting is, not matter what’s the size of your CO2 cylinder, refilling it will cost the same. It means, refilling 1L cylinder, will cost the same refilling 2L cylinder.

I did talk to the shopper how long the CO2 in the cylinder will last? Well, if I use 1 bubble per second, and only switch on during day time, it will last for 3 months. And refilling the cylinder will be RM20. So, compare that with RM13 per refill every 3 weeks previously (using fermentation).

Since the content of the cylinder is CO2 at a high pressure, there has to be a way that we can regulate the flow of CO2 gas. So, that’s when this CO2 pressure regulator comes in place. Just fit this to the CO2 cylinder, then you can control the flow of the outcoming CO2 gas.

But how to channel the CO2 gas from the cylinder into the aquarium? Well, the obvious answer is to use air hose, like this.

Since CO2 gas is colourless and odourless, how can I know how much the gas is coming out from the regulator that I fit earlier? We somehow has to make that visible. For that we need to use bubble counter.

How this works is, we will the container of bubble counter with water. So the CO2 will go into the bubble counter from one part, and out from the other part. From the flow, we can make the gas making bubble in the water. By looking at the rate of the bubble, there is a visual already on the rate of CO2 flow, and we can easily adjust the rate using the regulator. Neat huh!

Since this system works under a high pressure, when we shut the regultor valve, the pressure tend to be lower after that, and the water from aquarium will start to flow into the air host, and eventually reach the regulator. This will damage the regulator. So how to stop the water from flowing into regulator? Well, we use check valve for that.

Check valve only allow gas or liquid to travel in one direction only. The direction is embossed on the valve itself. So by fitting this valve before, the water cannot flow back into the air hose after the CO2 supply is shut off.

After all of the above process, finally, the CO2 gas will flow into aquarium. If you notice about air bubble in the water, eventually, it will travel to the water surface, and then escape from water. If the bubble is so big, the faster it travels to the surface.

And talking about CO2, the faster it travels to the survey, the lesser it dissolved in the water (which plant only use CO2 that is dissolved in the water for photosynthesis). And when the bubble of CO2 escape the water to the air, that is just a waste.

The idea is to make the CO2 bubble really tiny, so that it has more surface area and dissolve more in the water – avoid wastage. For this reason, CO2 diffuser needs to be used. The one that I’m using here is ceramic type. I will create a very fine CO2 bubble whent he gas escape into the water via the ceramic hole.

More photos and blog entry of this in action will come really soon. There are actually 2 more things in my wish list that I would like to have for my planted aquarium project. But these 2 things are really expensive, but for the sake of blogging, here are the 2 ultimate things that I wish to have (can do without it too, but if have, better)

Water Chiller
Plants don’t do well in a very low temperature, or very high temperature. If I were to setup the planted aquarium, and place it in my living room, the water temperature at my house will be around 29 to 31 degrees celcius. That’s too hot for the plant. The chiller will basically continously cool down the water to the temperature that we set. From my observation at aquarium shop that I visited, the water temperature is usually set at 25 degrees celcius.

Metal Halide lamp
The normal lamp used to light bulding, even though it looks so bright, it usually doesn’t emitting light with the spectrum that is good for plant. A good light aquarium should generate color temperature that is closely mimics natural midday sunlight. They do get much hotter to the touch than fluorescent tubes, they are putting out a lot more light at the same time. But this type of light can be expensive to purchase initially.

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Seems that I blog about my forth aquarium earlier than my third aquarium. How come?

Well, after my mini planted aquarium (which is my second one), I decided that I’m ready to start another planted aquarium at bigger scale. So there it was, I’m blogging about my “third” aquarium.

Remember my first aquarium? I have guppies, neon tetra and panda corydoras in, where I transfer them all to my matured “community” mini planted tank. So my first tank is empty now, and I was thinking of getting new fish.

Went to the nearby fish shop. Bad thing about these small fish shop is that, they don’t have the label telling the name of the fish. It’s no use also to ask the owner, as they will start giving “kampung” name to the fish, like ikan muka kuda (cichlid), ikan DBKL (pleco), ikan tulang (glass catfish) and plenty of other funny names.

I just happened to be attracted to that ikan muka kuda, and get a few of them, and place it in my first aquarium. With the help with the fish species book that I bought long time ago, I finally managed to identify the fishes that I just bought. Oh my. All of them are cichlid.

Cichlids are very aggresive, and very territorial. My small first tank wouldn’t be suitable at all to put cichlid in. I saw them quarrel a lot. This is when I decided to get another aquarium, which I will setup first before I started another planted aquarium. So I was getting this cheap aquarium and tank (without the top).

So this one becomes my third aquarium now, and the previous one that I blog (used to be third) now become forth aquarium.

Different from my community aquarium before where I can virtually mix any species of fish that is peaceful, cichlids are advised not to be mixed with other species. So people call this species tank. And here is my new cichlid tank.

Cichlids that I have are Malawi species, which naturally came from a rift lake in East Africa (Lake Malawi) that is very much alkaline, pH 7.5 to around 8.8. Good. Rocks that I put inside has helped to make the water alkaline.

And what happened to my first tank? Here how it looks now, really empty.

I have a plan already. I will turn aquarium to goldfish tank. I never had goldfish before. Been reading a little about goldfish – very sensitive fish, prone to disease, not suitable to be mixed with other species. Sounds fun. So stay tuned to see the development of this tank.

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I’m ready for my forth aquarium (timewise and financially). Why forth aquarium when you haven’t have the third one yet? Well, this is an editted entry. There’s conflict of interest really, whether I’m going to make another planted aquarium, or go for cichlid tank (will blog about this later). Later, I decided that I’ll go for planted aquarium again, after the learning curve that I went through setting my up mini planted aquarium. Then cichlid? Forth aquarium maybe (will blog in seperate entry for this).

As usual, before I started building up the aquarium, I have to stock the necessary equipment first. It means that it is another visit to LFS. I like to visit those that I haven’t visit before, checking out the price and also stock that they have. Been to Pandan Indah last 2 weeks, and today, I went to 88 Pets Mart Sunwaymas Commercial Centre.

Operating hours and business hour. For my easy reference later.

I’m a bit impressed. 88 Pets Mart do have quite good selection of stocks on display.

And I was there for almost 1 and 1/2 hour, browsing through the things that they have there, also visited the pet section on the second floor. I’m also now thinking that I’m ready to have a cat as a pet. Having a cat as a pet is like adopting a child. You have to make sure that you have time for them. Anyway, I also browse through things that can assist you in raising cat – cat food, travelling cage, cage (in the event that I’ll be away), feeding tray, shampoo etc.

Then, went down to first floor again, and do the shopping. I will go ADA setup again this time. I’m getting 1 big bag of Africana ADA soil, driftwood, cooling fan, rocks, broken bell as ornament (for nocturnal fish hiding), and lastly, blood worm, hikari small pellets and hikari cichlid food.

Getting them paid, and at the same time, I’m filling in the form to become a member there.

Different from The Pet Safari and The Pet Family where you get 5% discount after being a member, here it will give you 1 stamp for every RM20 you spend. After you get 16 stamps (that means spending RM320), you will get RM25 voucher. After a simple calculaation – RM25 divide RM320 times 100 = 7.8%. Hey. It’s even better. It’s like you are getting 7.8% discount. But there’s a catch. You need to get 16 stamps in 6 months time.

Anyway, for the shopping alone today I get 14 stamps already. 2 more stamps to go and I will entitle for RM25 voucher. My next purchase I guess (next month).

So I guess, after next salary, I will do another big shopping, and I can then proceed with setting up my third aquarium. I can’t wait.

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It’s almost been 4 weeks already since I last finished setting up my mini planted aquarium. When you are seeing it everyday, there are much changes that you can see, as if there is no change at all. But after putting the photo from the very first time and the current photo side to side, then I realized there are quite substantial changes that happened.

4 weeks ago

Current

CO2 fertilization and good light do make the plants in my aquarium grows rapidly. There is not much open space left for the fishes to swim and roam freely. I think it’s time to trim those plants.

I don’t consider I’m doing aquascaping here. Aquascaping is art, and Imran + Art = Disaster. I just simply get a pair scissor, and cut those long stem.

After cutting here and there, this is the final look of my mini planted aquarium now.

Aaahhhh.. More open space now for my fishes to swim around and chasing each other (especially my Zebra Danio).

Read the rest of the stories relating to this planted aquarium project:

1. Getting things for pilot try of planted aquarium
2. Setting up planted aquarium (phase 1)
3. Setting up planted aquarium (stranded)
4. Setting up planted aquarium (phase 2)
5. Final goods shopping for this aquarium
6. Experimenting with water temperature
7. Installing CO2 system
8. Fermentation started, CO2 bubbles start flowing in
9. More CO2 bubbles
10. Worrying about pH and excess CO2 over the night
11. Getting aquarium cleaners
12. Getting final fishes for the aquarium
13. Plants trimming

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