What do you do when you have LFS credits? I look for just one more spot to put a new tank. Here is the last spot left in my aquarium room. This 15gal will fit nicely under my 30gal. I plan on using it as a shrimp tank. I have had shrimp but they have sooner or later became live fish food. SO this time this tank is just for them and a small clean up crew ( Cory's, Otto's and Black Mollies )

In my past three redoes I have used this trick of cutting the bottoms out of milk jugs to ether keep in or out aggressive foreground plants or to for a terrace. Here I am using it to save on Eco-Complete. IN this area I will have ferns and Amubias. The rest of the tank is going to be foreground plants. By using the container to hold some plain gravel I could get by with just one bag of
Eco-Complete. I cut three jugs to form the size container I wanted and then used plastic wire ties to hold it all together.

When setting up a tank you want to have every thing set right the first time especially when it fits as tight as this one. I use black paper background for the back and one side. This tank fits so tight I wanted to make sure you couldn't see the back or side walls. I put some plastic side rails for the lights to sit on. I don't use glass tops on any of my tanks any more. When your doing maintenance on 5 plant tanks and three fish tanks you are all ways putting on or taking off tops. Pulse cleaning them, so I find it much easier not to use them.

Here you can see how the plain gravel and Eco-Complete are kept separated by the jug bottoms. The level of both are the same. If you ever want to make a terrace out of jug bottoms cut the juts taller and line the front with rocks or driftwood. Once your plant grow in you will never see the jugs.

Once it all together and set back into its final spot. You can see there is not much room for error here.

Finally you can see its filled up and ready for plants. What makes this work in such a tight spot is the use of the Duetto DJ 100 submersible filter. It takes up very little room. No HOB their such a pain for plant tanks, plus you need four inches in the back and room on top to remove them for cleaning. In my other 15gal tank I use the Duetto Dj 100 and all so made it a CO2 reactor that is work great so am using the same set up here. Lights are two 15w 9325K NO fluorescent for now. I may put an AH CF light kit in these fixtures in the future. I will up date pics when I get the plants in.

Its so much fun setting up new tanks!!

update 2/7/05
Post by russell
what are you going to grow in the cartoned off section? i am guessing some hairgrass looks good so far hawk.

Russell,
Actually the carton section is just plain gravel. I used it to save on Eco-Complete. In this area I am going to plant stuff like Ferns and Anubias. These plants are attached to small rocks and driftwood. They feed mostly form the water column so they should be fine in just plain gravel substrate. The rest of the tank will have root feeding plants like Crypts and foreground plants. Here is a pic of what I have so far.

I need to decide on what type of foreground plant I am going to use. It will depend on light. Right now I have 2x15w NO 9325K This gives me 2w/gal. with low levels of CO2 this tank should be fine. How ever it will limit me on foreground plants, so if I use something like Baby Tears this might work. BUT if I want faster growing Baby Tears they would need better lighting. Not wattage but penetration. What I am thinking about doing is getting 2x13w CF from AH and fitting them in the NO fixtures. If what I have been saying " its more important to have light penetration then watts/gal "
this would be a time to prove it. So over the next few months I will add CO2 and some foreground plants, we will see how they do and then I will change the lighting to CF and lets see how they compare in growth. Sounds like a plan!

OH!! If you look closely at the pic you can see some algae. Look closely, they have been dipped in a bleach bath. The algae is turning a gray showing that its dead. The mollie clean up crew will have it eaten up in a week if I don't feed them.

Hawk