240L setup - Day 1

Today I did the setup of my 240L tank. I spend over 7 hours today doing this and I hope this will survive the cycling period. One week ago I bought the pieces of Mangrove roots and decided to base this layout around them. Those are two big guys so the layout was kind of tricky. First I put them into aquarium and filled it in with water to also check if the aquarium is correctly glued. Today my day started with taking this water out. Than the roots took a shower and I began setting up the soil. As the Amano stuff is almost impossible to get in the 400km zone, not saying about crazy expensiveness of it, I decided to go with the German stuff and I bought Dennerle Deponit Mix (Pro). So first thing was to setup the Dennerle's floor heating. This stuff should help water circulation in the soil to improve nutrients delivery to plants and so on.

Than came the Deponit soil (2cm deep). I also put more of it in the back making two hills behind the roots. Next I put Manado soil on top of it from JBL. This thing should be pH neutral what is important for me. I put aroud 6 cm of it and more on those two hills. It part took a while to setup the soil properly, It took around 15kg of Deponit and 35 kg of Manado, so my soil weights 50kg. After setting this up I put back the root, setting them up was quite easy as I already knew what I was going after. Planting started after around 1.5h. I did only sprayed a bit of water over the soil and I put maybe 10 liters of water to make sure that there is some humidity there. I started with Glossostigma, and it took a lot of time and nerves to put it there. I'll be listing the plants in another entry so if you are interested in the types of the plants I used search for it. Overall it took around 2h to fully plant the tank. The whole setup should be visible after 6 weeks when all the plants should have some significant growth. After planting came the lengthy process of putting the water in, fixing plants that really wanted to go back to the surface etc. 3.5 hours later the tank was full. I was using some de-chlorinator to make the water nicer for everyone. As I said before, my water has high pH so I started CO2 delivery as soon as the reactor was covered by water and in few hours the pH was in good range for my plants. Make sure that if you have fish in your tank you will not make quick changes in pH. I also decided to exchange part of my filter for a active coal. This stuff will remove the de-chlorinator waste and also some colorants from the roots. After 4 weeks this guy will go out and the default stuff will move in. I will post more pictures later when I will be taking about some plants I've chosen and the setup I made.

Cheers,
Marcin