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I'm considering a total tank redecoration for all my plecos. I want to change the almost empty setup with some waterpest plants to a roughly half rocks (a type we can buy here called "breuksteen". It's quarried in Belgium in the Ardennes and inert), half wood tank.

The wood for my expanding (in buying more specimens for breeding) family of Clown pleco's, and the rocky part for the bristlenose family. The woody part is not really the issue. Just add some roots I bought in the LFS, after cleaning and soaking offcourse.

The tricky part is the rock part. I need to dig around in the gravel underbed to lay down some tempex, or turf to protect my glass tank bottom.

The question(s).

1 how does this digging affect the water quality in my tank?

2 should I do the redecorating this winter, or wait out until spring and my BN fry can be sold to a LFS?

3 should I clean out the entire tank, just to clean all gravel and take out the lava gravel in it? That stuff really is garbage. It gets infested with red/brown algae wich you can't get rid of without tossing out the affected pieces of gravel.

4 can the BN fry (1 month old) safely be moved to my 60 liter tank for growing out? That tank is running for more than 2 years now. It would make my life a lot easier in redecorating the tank.

5 I suppose I can't keep all my fish in this 60 liter tank for a couple of days. The big tank needs to be cycled again before I can add my fish back in it? I do have an X amount of guppies and swordtails for cycling, but that means the soon to be 5 clowns, and about 40 BN (2 adults plus fry) must stay in the small tank for a couple of weeks.

The whole operation, if I totally clean out the big tank will probably take a couple of days, maybe a week. Perhaps even more when I don't like the initial setup.

Help in answers is greatly appreciated. BTW: I don't have access to more tanks.

If you can keep your filter running on the temporary tank, you should be ok. When you replace the substrate and decorations, you'll lose some bacteria. To make up for this you may set up an additional filter for a couple weeks on your current tank. Then when you move the fish to the temporary tank take the main filter and this supplemental one with them. After you get the main tank redone, move the whole works back. After you think the new substrate/decorations are colonized you can remove the supplemental filter.

The supplemental filter may or may not be needed, but if you've got one laying around it can't hurt anything.

I've got 2 broken Eheim external filters laying around. Output pipes are broken off on both. And a couple of working internal filters.

Well, the topic is already here. So why not have some fun with it for once. I'm going to keep an online journal of my aquascaping attempt. I hope you have as much fun reading it, and hopefully if I did something wrong in helping me out, as I do.

First pic: the problem!

Loads of waterpest and duckweed, even more snails, not nearly enough hiding places for my 2 Ancistrus Cirrhosus, and certainly no good hiding and living spots for my 4 Panaque Maccus.

So the idea grew to do a complete makeover for the tank. Getting rid of the snails and medium gravel, and making enough room and hiding spots to keep all 6 plecos happy.

So this morning, after breakfast and a bad-grade B-movie (American Ninja 4, so old skool, full of errors and lousy acting it's actually lots of fun watching!) the game was on. First task: emptying the tank, catching fish big-time. Guppies are stupid fish, they swim in your net by the hundreds at a time. The swordtails and juvie Ancistrus were the problem, they are fast and smart!


I don't know how many Ancistrus babies!


Crowded 60 liter tank, I didn't put the 2 adult Ancistrus in, because of the 4 Panaque adolescents living in there. The 2 Ancistrus were having a turfwar back in april, I don't want that to happen in a 60 liter tank! Ancistrus adults living in 2 buckets at the moment, a breeze to catch, they both held on to their wood logs wich could be transferred with the fish in the buckets laying on it's side!


Almost empty!



Sifting gravel,

To take this medium size, wich is a very good growing media for brown algae out!


Since I'll use a lot of stones in my new setup, I need to have something to protect the bottom of my tank. The idea was turf plating, wich was used in the old days. Those plates are still available, but would cost something like €100 for the complete tank! I didn't like the idea of adding tempex to my tank. It's not natural, I don't know what'll happen if my fish somehow dig it up and start eating it. An idea came from a LFS. Why not add a cork backplate on the bottom.


Great idea, but....... you probably guessed it, it floats! A lot! So much I have to weigh it down at the moment with my big rocks wich I intend to use for aquascaping. I do have about 15 kilo's or something fine gravel, and totalling 34 kilo's of this Belgian Ardennes rock, wich will go back in the tank. I need to check out if that weighs down the cork plate enough to keep it on the bottom of my tank.

I'm not happy with the floating situation, because now my Ancistrus can't get back in the tank. That's the whole idea of today, get them back in A.S.A.P., because I don't have living space for them elsewhere! And it's certainly not a good idea to keep them in 2 buckets for a day longer.

Anyone any idea's on that one? Preferably today, since I've got the whole evening ahead of me to help the 2 big cats out.

Well, here we go. A new day. Yesterday evening, because of the Ancistrus adults, I got going with placing the rocks in my tank. As already told, they couldn't stay in the buckets for the night. They wouldn't survive it. No running water, no more than 3 or 4 liters per bucket, no heating!


A pic of the initial setup, as of yesterday evening. The cork plate is still underneath the gravel, works just fine if you put enough weight on it. In my case: 34 kilos of rock and about 10-12 kilos of fine gravel. Gravel was only sifted for the bigger parts I wanted out. Not cleaned in any way, because of healthy bacteria still living in the detritus between the gravel. I also left a good 10-12 cm's of water in my tank from the previous setup to help bacteria grow.

Had to do some fixing up of the wooden cover on top of my tank. Moisture had it split at one of the joints. Had to take a little piece of swollen wood out to make sure I could screw the parts in place again.


Furthermore I did fiddle around with the rocks some more. In the initial setup the accent was partially on the right off-center, instead of all the way to the left of the tank. On the absolute right side I made a place with a lot of sunken wood for my Clown plecos.

Lost my Ancistrus all day long. Found them under the driftwood pieces they were on when I put them back in the tank yesterday evening. Funny how they can remember what piece belonged to which fish!

After cleaning those pieces I lost them again. Found them both in the rocky crevices I intentionally put in there for them. Haven't seen one of them near the driftwood as of yet. They are both a little skittish at the moment, so I hope it'll turn out just fine in the next couple of days. Or else I must rethink my decoration setup.



Last pic as of now. The almost finished product. Need to look at the driftwood on the right, it's not really what I was looking for. And need to sort out that big fat Eheim 2226 I got for this tank. Need to look into the gasket leaking problem first before running it on this tank. Don't want half of it's water content on the floor (150+ liters!) when I'm not at home.

Fish I want to add to this setup: the 4 clown plecos, and my very beautiful swordtail fish. Nice, big, very beautiful colors and hardy (male is seen in the pics in the beginning, and in the 60 liter tank)! They don't die on me as fast as the guppies do, and they cannibalize their own young, so no fry all over the place anymore! Guppies are nice, but they are small, and inbreeding causes weak specimens which intend to die when you turn your head away for a sec.

And I do intend to seed the tank with a lot of "rainbow" shrimps, my personal cleanup crew for detritus and leftover food stuff. A lot nicer to look at than those pesky snails.

Plants are only there for keeping the water healthy, so no need for expensive ones if you can do it with loads of Elodea Canadensis (known here as waterpest!) Got a bucket load left of it from my previous setup, emailed my brother who has a red cheek turtle. Maybe that critter eats it like we eat veggies.

So there's my tank redecoration. Took me about 20-24 hours work in total, spread out over 2 days. Please tell me what you think of it.

I was surprised by a litter of baby Ancistrus Cirrhosus today! I knew the male was in a cave, I could see in the darkness he was fanning, but never saw the eggs! The male uses his fins for the fanning movement even when he doesn't have any eggs.

So the tank redeco is a big success, if I have a litter of fry within a month!

Glad to hear the fish are already reproducing again and I agree the tank looks much nicer. It is hard to tell from the photos, but the substrate looks quite deep. I think you will find over time that it will trap a lot of "sawdust" from the Panaque and general detritus which will fuel another explosion of the snail population. For long term maintenance, I would recommend keeping your substrate as shallow as possible.
-Shane

A lot of the substrate, especially from the middle to the left, is keeping the cork plate down. That think floats like styrofoam if you don't keep it weighed down.

The rightside hasn't got the cork plate part as much as the left side. I used left over substrate to level it out with the left part to have a cleaner look. Cork plate is half an inch thick. It's in there purely to keep the rocks from falling and cracking the glass bottom plate.

In my opinion it was the best environmental solution to the rock and glass problem. Styrofoam and/or tempex is a non biological product if I'm correct. Don't want my precious (not because they are expensive, which they are not. But because I like them and want them to have a good quality life!) fish to eat that, get sick and die because of it.

Could the cork plate not be siliconed in place?

I have nothing protecting the base of any of my tanks & in some there are lots of rocks piled to the water surface, groups of rocks can be fixed together to create "modules" with silicon or milliput or suchlike which enable us to build rigid structures that won't topple.

That w2as a possibility if I had more time. My problem was the 2 adult Ancistrus in the buckets. They could in my opinion not survive a day without heating and fresh water.

So that was a corner I had to cut. Both adults had to be back in the big tank with at least some sort of filtration in the evening. No time to completely clean out and dry the tank. It would have taken more hours which I didn't have before I went to bed late in the evening.