Back After A Few Years Hiatus.

Hello everyone.

A quick bit about me. 48 year old System Administrator of a Data Centre test lab in Australia. Currently learning to fly (and have gone solo!!!!), and an aviation photographer with a wife and two children. One in the late teens and the other now an adult (where did the time go?!).

I’ve been an aquarist since two weeks before I got married over 25 years ago.

My wife and I bought our first tank that was a small little bench top tank that I’m sure everyone bought as their first hobby tank. You know the one. Single fluorescent tube, small wattage heated and an under gravel filter. That only lasted about 6 months before we then bought a 3 foot tank with a wet/dry trickle filter. After a house move, I made the decision to add some realism to the tank by attaching polystyrene sheets to the insides of the tank on which I then used a wire brush to shape. Once that was done, use a flame brush to crust the polystyrene. I then bushed on a water safe tar and then pressed on a mix of peat moss and sand. After several rinses to remove residues and left over materials, it was good to go. This gave the tank a nice river bed/bank look.

That tank went on to last us close to 18 years before we upgraded to a 6’ x 2’ x 2’. The old tank went to my wife’s pre-school for a number of years where I help set it up and clean it during the school holidays.

The push to the 6’ tank was brought on by wanting to have a decent size tank that was planted. I did try fitting in a CO2 reactor into the previous tank but, being an old design, there just wasn’t the room in the tank or filter for additional equipment including more lighting.

My neighbor at the time was a great inspiration to me. He had a number of fish tanks himself over the years and had even setup a tank breeding room for African Cichlids. He gave a number of items to assist me such a repaired wet/dry trickle filter and a Eheim 1262 (universal 3400 which is still going strong with the original impeller!). The tank was briefly setup for about 6 months before we moved into our next house.

As a result of the move, a few modifications were made. I painted the back of the tank black, installed my own T5 lighting with dimmable electronic ballasts that’s was controlled by a PIC Microcontroller for which I had written the code. The dimming code was developed but never implemented as I ended up migrating it to a Raspberry Pi and coded it all in Python. With the Pi being more powerful and the ballasts being dimmable, I was able to create and sunrise and sunset effect. The Pi also controlled the tanks temperature as per the PIC Microcontroller design. The idea was to eventually add a pH probe that was read by the Pi and log its changes along with the temperature to be accessed from a web page. The pH probe and web page never eventuated due to a few technical issues with the Pi at the time.

It ran in this state for a number of years before the pressures of work began to interfere with the maintainability of the setup and it was then left to sit.

A refresh it underway with a new sump to be built. The previous one whilst doing its job, just didn’t have the water capacity. That is to say, the water level in the sump was a fine balance between being just right to allow for back flow from the tank during a power outage and just enough for the pump to stop sucking air during normal operation. Lighting will be replaced with an LED setup for plants along with more PAR. Plans also include an automated water changing system. An upgraded Raspberry Pi will be setup to control/monitor everything. I’ll post the full details of the new, intended setup later.

Anyhow, enough dribble from me. I’m off to have a read through the forums and enhance my learning in the mean time, enjoy a few random images of my tank in its previous form.

Cheers!
Bald_Noggin