Thursday, February 04, 2010

Time Warp---Underwater!

So, obviously nobody reads my blog, and for good reason. I haven't publicized it anywhere (nor told anyone it exists), and I haven't updated it in nearly 2 years. Shame. So, this post shall serve simply as the dividing line. It's like the little broken lines you see on graphs sometimes, to signify that many values have been skipped for sake of saving space; they values, however, do exist somewhere between the lines.

The original tank grew up. I had some more problems with Ich, and I lost most of my fish. I got some new fish. They generally survived. I got more plants, got the CO2 injection and fertilizers, and kept on truckin. Things were looking good for my aquatic hobby.

Then, I moved. I formulated a plan. I unrooted all of the plants and put them into buckets of water (from the tank). That's when I really realized the scale of the project. I had a lot of plants. Then, I siphoned all the water out into 5 gallon buckets. I saved half the water for the new setup. In the remaining water, it was easy to chase all the fish down and net them into their own awaiting buckets (some with the plants). I pulled as much of the water out as I could, and then I scooped the substrate. I think it's about 80-100 lbs. of gravel. Fun. Then, as quickly as possible, I and a friend loaded everything into the truck, and drove 5 minutes over to my new condo. Where I was now confronted with stairs. Shira and I had already spent plenty of time worrying about the new location for the tank. There just wasn't a lot of room for a big aquarium in our small living room. But I picked a spot and went with it. I'm still happy with my choice 6 months later. Once the tank was in place, I just reversed the process. The whole project took about 12 hours, start-to-finish.

So, now the new tank has been up and running for 6 months. No problems. I'll discuss its current state in the next post, which should come soon, as I have much to talk about.