Change of tank setup

[Zulaab]

I have changed the look of my tanks.  Here are the new pictures of the tanks

The 75 Malawi tank.  All my Malawi fish are now in this one tank


The 70 changed from Malawi to Tanganyika -- Brichardi & Leleupi tank.


The 58 is my new Tanganyika dubs grow out tank.


This is my 42 gallon baby grow out tank.


Here is a close up of my babies

Dubs


Brichardi, Leleupi, yellow Labs, Red Rubesens

[eklikewhoa]

Re: Change of tank setup

Looks good....the 70g could use a bit less "Jenga" look to it though.

[Zulaab]

Re: Change of tank setup

Yeah I thought about when I built it.. but I will be honest with you.. when you see it in person it looks amazing.  The only thing I am worried about is that there might not be enough caves that can be guarded easy therefore the fish might not want to spawn.. I dont know.. we will see.. right now it was a massive under taking to do.. I dont really want to do it all over again.. heheh

Edited for spelling / grammer mistakes

[Fire_chair]

Re: Change of tank setup

The 75 looks really, really good.

[finfan]

Re: Change of tank setup

the baby pix are too cute  

my favorite is the 75

all looking good

[Hanson77]

Re: Change of tank setup

What are the dimensions of the 70G, is it a 36" wide tank?  

Tanks look great by the Zulaab!!!!

[rrocket2002]

Re: Change of tank setup

Thumbs up Jesper.

[J-WS6]

Re: Change of tank setup

sweeeeet!

[Zulaab]

Re: Change of tank setup

What are the dimensions of the 70G, is it a 36" wide tank?  

Tanks look great by the Zulaab!!!!

Hanson :)   The 70g is a 36x18x25 -- made by Ocean Atlantis.  You can get one from Charles at Fish Ranch in Rosenberg -- I believe if you ask him nicely you can get tank, tops, stand and lights for $239.00 pre-paid (?)  dont kill me on the price... but I promise you its no more than a few more or less dollars from that price point.
I dont know if the cherry oak color trim on the tank makes it more expensive or not.
I love this tank because it has that nice big piece of glass in front :)
Personally I dont like the 75 because its "only" 20in tall..  I want a 90 or 110 which gives me that bigger window :)

[armthehomeless]

Re: Change of tank setup

Looks good. What type of light do you have on the 75?

[supadave]

Re: Change of tank setup

All the tanks look great...Zulaab !!!! I really like the 75 gal. I have always had a black background on all my tanks, but I think I will try blue on my next tank. Did you paint the back or is that cloth or paper? Zulaab .... you're gonna make me go and re-aquascape my tanks. 8)

[myjohnson]

Re: Change of tank setup

All the tanks look good to me! I like the dub grow out one the most. I might be a little bias because I just love me some trophs!

[imagirlgeek]

Re: Change of tank setup

You make me want to re-scape our tanks!  Great job!  

[Zulaab]

Re: Change of tank setup

Looks good. What type of light do you have on the 75?

4ft Odyssea dual T-6 lighting with a regular T6 12000K bulb and a T6 Actinic Blue True 03 bulb.  Bought it from Mike at Mike's tropical fish and pets.  I know that Xtreme and Charles in Rosenberg sells Odyssea lights.
Personally, I am thinking next time around I am going to see about getting T5's or T8's as getting replacement bulbs are not easy for these things.  Xtreme has some.

Did you paint the back or is that cloth or paper?

Supadave -- I didnt paint the glass myself (its actually painted on all three sides, back and sides)  The tank was sold to me as a tank coming out of a now defunct petstore.   It had "Parrot fish $24.99" written on the front glass when I got the tank...   I cleaned it and have been using it for a while.  I am not 100% sure what color blue it is, but under the actinic light it looks even better.

If you go to my fish link below, you will see how the tanks basically looked before I changed over.   The 75 + 70 had been slightly altered from what you see, but the 58 never changed looks until the other night.

Now I cannot take more than 50% creative aquascaping credit for the whole thing.  I did have my good friends Steve and Terri help out :)
To give you all some numbers to think about.

Friday we started with the 58.  Removed all fish, drained can then reset all the sand that was in the tank already.  Removed the Marineland (walmart type) 330 without the bio wheels (walmart sells the same unit just no wheels), cleaned the Eheim 2213, and added a Aquaclear 110 onto the tank.  We doubled basically the water movement with the aquaclear -- its awesome !!
Doing that tank since there was not much of a change done a little more than 2 hours.  At this point it looked like without a problem we could get two more tanks done in 6 hours....  I would be so wrong it was not even funny...

The 70... caught all the fish.  Dropped them in the 75.   Drained the tank.  Removed all the gravel, and installed pool filter sand (Tim Bell THANK YOU FOR THE ADVICE ON THIS SAND !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)  Then started building what you see..  this took at least another 2 hours plus as we made a ton of small caves in the structure which you cannot see, and I am thinking that I need to redo this because they are to big in the sense there is more open area than there needs to be.  This project will be revisited in a few weeks unless I have seen babies swimming around and then I will wait a little longer.
Cleaned out all the filters (Eheim 2215 + Aquaclear 50) and I added a Marineland MaxiJet 1200 for added circulation.  I am not filtering on this filter.. just moving water.. I wanted to make sure that I didnt end up with dead spots in the tank -- Total time to work on this a little more than 6 hours to finish.  This did include driving up to the rock yard and picking up the slate so subtract 1 hour.

The Day after (saturday) Steve showed up around 3pm and we where done around 11pm that night re-doing the 75.
Again removed all the fish, and as we removed them I would check everyone to make sure they where not holding.  (I ended up missing one so she spit some fry in to the bucket.)  All the other holding females went into my grow out tank.   Then removed all the black sand and installed again Pool filter sand.   Again Tim Bell thank you for the good words and great looking tanks which at last convinced me that I needed to go the same route.   I didnt clean my wet / dry out.  I didnt see a reason to do it.  All of my yellow labs in a matter of two days lost all of their black splotches in their body (because of the black sand) and have started to really show some great yellow.   I am going to go out on a limb here and say there is no question about it that fish take the color of the substrate and attempt to imitate it to blend in better to be ready for hide from predators.

I enjoy rescaping looking at tanks for hours trying to figure out what looks good to you and what works great for the fish.  
In the 75 I created the look to have more of an opportunity for young fish to make it, by creating basic canals between the rocks (this can be done looking awesome with Mexican Beach Pebble rock) or like with the holey rock you just get more fissures and places for fry to survive..   All the rocks for this base used are the size of cantaloupes.  Then the other side I put up the large pieces that divide the area and gives area for the fish to create their temp territories to spawn.

I will try and take some more pictures soon of that tank including some close ups

[myjohnson]

Re: Change of tank setup

Man talk about a long days work! Seems like it paid off.  Keep us updated.