Flowers Lawn Care

Freshwater Aquariums for Dummies

It is very easy to create very nice aquariums that take very little maintenance. I will show you how.

Introduction

My Aquariums are nice.

I am kind of a dummy when it comes to these things, it took me some 30 years to figure it out, I don't want you to take that long, so I want to make it simple for you to build fantastic aquariums and even simpler to maintain them.

It is my goal to acquaint the reader with the progress in understanding the difference between standard aquarium practice and a biological filtration method of keeping an aquarium in a user friendly way.

I will do this with a mixture of telling my story and telling you why these ideas work, as well as telling you what to do.

Your story of keeping aquariums might look a bit like mine.

When I was a young boy growing up in Mission Hills (San Diego), I kept fish in small tanks in my bedroom with all the typical items you might find in an aquarium kit. A box filter provided physical filtration and aeration, I cleaned the bottom regularly.

I loved the fish and tried to make a comfortable life for them by buying plants and stone bubblers, large air pumps, colored lights, and all the things I thought they would enjoy.

Periodically things would go wrong and I would lose groups of fish or entire tanks of fish. Plants, however, died with amazing regularity.

I kept buying "bunch" plans, sold with a rubber band to hold them into a "bunch, " or a lead strip to hold them on the bottom. Plants like Cabomba, Motherwort, Hornwort or others are still sold this way. Many bunches were purchased, but none lived more than a few weeks.

Without fear or trepidation I continued to buy plants and fish with my parent's money for as long as I could.

Well, all wasn't as I was told in the aquarium shop or online with "experts." I found that the further I strayed from standard operating proceedures, the better things became. The fish bread faster, the plants grew better, even the algae seemed more under control when the air pump died and the filters remained unattended to for months on end. Sound strange? Keep reading, and looking at the photos.

Not always true, you see I also sell my plants to the local fish store who loves local plants grown in tap water.

What's the difference? I'll tell you, and here is the story in brief which also will save you a lot of time and experimenting if you want to set up a tank.

Step One, CO2

Let's make the story a little longer and, step by step explain why you can set up a great tank in a few hours that will be a great joy to keep and watch.

I have owned a series of tanks.

The first set-up of this series of tanks, more than thirty years ago involved the typical tank set-up if you go to the local fish store and ask how to do it: Under gravel filter, even a canister filter, change the water periodically, cover the under gravel filter with, what else? Gravel!

Charcoal, Amino Chips, filter fiber, water treatment chemicals, antibiotics, antifungal medications, and air hoses, bubblers, and on and on it went. I actually daisy chained the stones together so bubbles crossed the entire back of the tank. It looked great.

I loved the tank but had a hard time keeping my plants alive, and periodically I had catastrophic failures. For instance, I had a tank filled with 12 large angle fish I had raised from fry, beautiful fish that graced the tanks swimming in their school and were candy for the eyes. At a large pet shop I bought a pair of loaches that I had never seen before, beautiful light blue body with yellow tails. I put them into the tank and they had Ick, a fungal fish disease then soon killed every single fish in the tank.

Different fish different set up different plants. Everything went a bit better this time I learned you can use a salt bath for new fish to keep Ick out. Simply dip new fish into a bowl with salt water for about 5 seconds, and you are all set. The difference in salinity (concentration of salts) produces a salinity gradient that the osmoregulators in the fish can handle for fifteen to twenty minutes, but fungi and bacteria cannot stand for more than a few seconds. (The reverse also works, salt water dipped in fresh water.)

Feeling a bit like Mr. Bean, smiling at his success, the tank went well for several weeks and I even added a more complex set of bubblers to display a beautiful stream of bubbles at the back of the tank. This time the plants died even quicker than before. So, like Mr. Bean I reluctantly scooped out dead plants for several months until my air pump died.

"Great!" I thought in a typical Bean fashion grumbling, "now I will have to go buy another air pump." The under gravel filter was also enervated by air, so it stopped working also. Money was a bit tight so I delayed for several months and low and behold, the plants stopped dying. Even the rooted plants came to life as they had never done before.

Hmm.

What was going on?

Conventional wisdom tells us we need air exchange for the fish so bubblers and bubble stones provide this oxygen.

How about plants? What do they need? They need carbon dioxide. The bubble stone exchanges oxygen for the carbon dioxide in the tank (there is already too much nitrogen in the tank from fish waste). Additionally, the dispersing tip at the end of the inflow coming from a canister filter spreads the incoming water across the surface of the tank and added to the oxygen exchange. (Don't even think of the bio-wheel style which oxygenates the water even more.) I took that dispersing end off so the water could drop straight into the tank and the surface could remain stable, helping to hold in CO2.

Not at all good you might say, carbon dioxide is a poison to the fish!

Well, yes, if there is too much and you are an animal this is true; however, if you are a plant (granted, it is unlikely that you are a plant) this is the stuff you photosynthesize into the sugars you need to grow. Just add water and light. Photosynthesis, remember 6th grade science?

My plants were doing so well and looked so good that I never replaced the bubblers, in fact, I eventually threw the stones away and my plants kept growing. . . To my despair. Did I tell you I really like bubbles? I will admit an aquarium with thick plant growth trumps bubbles.

The under gravel filter had not worked in some time and the rooted plants were growing rapidly, to the point of needing weekly trimming. I realized that the bacteria in the soil were holding and creating ammonia from the nitrogen in the tank and the roots of the plants prefer that form of nitrogen to other forms. The bacteria were creating fertilizer, but even with this the fish were doing just fine.

That was a great first step toward creating a more natural tank.

What I didn't quite realize at the time was that the under gravel filter was great for removing the nitrogen from the tank and very poor for allowing roots to absorb ammonia. The same bacteria that convert ammonia into nitrate and nitrite so it can escape into the air in an aerobic environment did the opposite in an anaerobic environment!

So, if oxygen is present ammonia decreased, of oxygen is missing, as it was when I turned off the under gravel filter, ammonia was created and rapidly absorbed by the plant roots. Wow! What a design!

This was the first big step in growing plants: Turn off anything that makes bubbles!

(I had a secretary once that, after I set up a 100 gallon aquarium kept repeating, "you need bubbles" or "the fish need bubbles, " for months she repeated this, waiting in vain for the fish to die.)

In addition to liking bubbles, I really like aquarium gravel. I used the largest I could find, then I mixed in small river washed granite gravel, sometimes called "pea gravel" to make the appearance a little more bold.

When I realized that the detritus in the bottom of the tank (fish droppings and dead plant materials) was working its way into that gravel and also creating CO2 I reduced the amount of cleaning I did in the bottom to increase the CO2.

The plants grew faster.

Additionally, the larger gravel helped this, I thought, since it was allowing it to go below the surface and out of site. What I didn't realize was that the gravel was also allowing more oxygen into that detritus so it wasn't breaking down as fast.

Swimming pool filter sand is the ultimate answer, and variations of that can be added.

More later. . .

Step Two, Water Changes

By that time I had plants growing in the tank so happy they can even be seen giving off oxygen bubbles in small streams once in a while.

In various on-line fish groups people took the standard stance on water changes: Change 25% of the water every week, and. preferably, use aged water, that is, water left out in open containers for a few weeks to vent their chlorine and pick up bacteria.

I kept a 5 gallon water jug in the back yard to age the water which I carried into the house every week and changed some water weekly, but that wasn't quite enough so I also filled one or more large containers and refilled the 5 gallon tank several times.

This is a lot of work, and I wasn't getting any younger, but the fish did well and the plants flourished, so it was OK for a while.

I now keep a rather unusual liver bearer called Endler's Livebearer Poecilia wingei and the population was stable and the tank looked great.

The conventional wisdom said that certain proteins in the water given off by fish would inhibit other fish from developing or diminish the fertility of the fish. This certainly didn't stop the fish. They picked up the nickname Endless Livebearers.

While this sounded reasonable, since all plants and animals do things like this with chemical classified as allelopathic chemicals, I could find no information on these supposed chemicals even though several people had offered names for them.

Then I became very busy and I did not have time to change my water for several weeks. My on-line friends including a retired zoologist predicted dire consequences for my fishes, however, most of them keep fish in totally empty tanks, just fish and water so they can control water parameters. But the dire consequences in my tank never happened, in fact, quite the opposite. Remember my tank is heavily planted at the time and well filtered.

About 6 weeks later when I had the time to change the water, I realized that I had saved about $15 the previous month in aquarium supplies by not changing the charcoal and other materials. This was good. Money was still tight.

As a side bar, my friend Jim had a fish room which virtually dozens of small tanks. He raised his own live food, and changed something like 20% of the water in the tanks every day! This "hobby" takes up the majority of his time.

Flip the coin to the plant keepers.

People who follow the Japanese way of keeping plants do the same, but recommend half that in water changes, a mere 10% per day!

A Little Experiment

I decided to do a little experiment.

Let's just leave the filter as-is and leave the water unchanged and see what happens to the tank. The ominous yet unproved elements that were supposed to suppress the other fishes growth was, after all supposedly a protein and the bacteria should break it down also. (I suppose this is a real situation that in a normal tank that is periodically treated with antibiotics [anti-bacterial medicine] there are insufficient bacteria to handle the organic compounds.)

Being that the filter had fiber, which can house lithotrophic bacteria, amino chips, which is a type of clay, and charcoal, which, after all its binding sites are occupied is an excellent bacteria holder, I should have a reasonable good bacteria filter in place already.

Low and behold, the fish looked better and better and the plants grew faster and faster and everything was humming along just fine without changing the water.

So much for dire consequences, creation was doing the job it was designed to do.

Now, instead of changing 25% of the water every week in three large tanks, changing filter materials, buying more filter materials, and spending half my Saturday working with aquariums, I saved about 60 to 80 gallons of water and all the cost of the filter materials, and, time. This is good.

Still, I wondered if this was good for the fish so I watched carefully to see if I started to see any problems with gill damage, impaired swimming, dying fish, and all the other problems that go along with an unstable or unsuitable environments.

Low and behold, the plants were using up the nitrogen and carbon dioxide. In fact, the plants didn't get enough CO2 from the air exchange, the water needed more to feed the plants. The plants make sugars, then plant fibers, and gave off oxygen.

Of course, now, the local aquarium shop only saw me when I went in to sell plants and buy food. They had plenty of plants, I had plenty of food.

This was good, until they stopped buying plants, then I had lots of mulch. Not to worry, there is always another store which will buy the plants.

Step Three, Lighting

Plants need light. This is obvious unless you are growing saprophytes like mushrooms. Since the fish were fertilizing my plants and the plants were needed to take the ammonia out of the water, it seemed apparent I needed more plants.

This would also help with the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the tank. The plants need the carbon dioxide to grow, but the fish need oxygen. Carbon dioxide in solution is carboxylic acid when it picks up a hydrogen atom (CO2 + H ' COOH) so this lowers the pH of the tank. Oxygen raises the pH of the tank partly by displacing the CO2.

At night plants give off CO2 in their dark cycle making the water more acid, and in the day, they make the water more alkali because they make oxygen. This cycle helps balance the bacteria in the tank and keep things in check. More light means more oxygen in the day and more CO2 at night, a stronger CO2 cycle. I suspect this helps the fish also but I'm not sure how.

So I made my own light fixture. (Don't bother with this, they have better lighting now, but it worked well at the time.) Using common household items like a redwood patio table, I pounded out a metal box, ends and all and reduced two neon shop fixtures into the box so I had four neon tubes in a small area. Since my tank is just over four feet long, this worked.

The plants loved it.

P.S. I also used different colored neon lights to get more color spectrum in the tank.

Step Four, Biological Filters

I went to my books and the internet and started to read about biological filtration, the bacteria and the various requirements of making a good filter.

In short, this is allowing natural bacteria in the tank to do its job and handle the waste of the fish and plants, etc. (See the technical information at the end for specifics.) The strange part is that all the information was pointed toward fish keeping, not toward a total aquarium system. Most bacterial filters are used for farm raised fish. Those used for aquariums make the error of the "biological wheel" where the wheel, as in the film Finding Nemo, is exposed to the air, decreasing the CO2 in the tank which again, the plant need.

I know that there is a bacteria designed to process every organic molecule. The information I found verified that this was feasible if you kept just enough fish in the tank to balance the nitrogen load and handle all the lesser elements in the tank.

Is this a good trade: a tank with low maintenance but few fish?

I don't like crowds, I avoid crowds, except at Haunama Bay on Oahu where I tolerate the crowds, and also aquariums where I like crowds, the more the merrier. Besides, live bearers reproduce ad hoc so controlling their numbers is tough.

So, let's check the surface area of the tank to see where we can get more. Where are the surfaces that can be occupied by bacteria?

The walls of the tank.

The surface of the water.

The bottom of the tank, that is, the top of the substrate, at this point, gravel.

The gravel surfaces below the top layer.

The surfaces of the plants. Make no mistake, in a well planted tank, this is a very large area.

In the filter, the surface of the charcoal, the amino chips, and the fiber.

I certainly can increase the surface area of the plants by letting more of them stay in the tank, so this is easy. I did another little test and watched.

It worked. The aquarium continued to improve and I had fewer and fewer problems with the fish since they were not periodically medicated which weakens the immune system and kills the bacteria and fungus in the tank.

Women, always conscious about bacteria, start to question me at this point. We have been brought up to think that bacteria are bad. In the normal course of food preparation, this is good thinking. We are meticulous when we cook chicken. We wash our hands before, during, and after handling it because of bacteria contamination which is very common with chicken simply because it is such a good food, bacteria like it too. But this is a small ecosystem and the bacteria are helpful unless they happen to be blue-green in color, we will address that later.

They occupy all surfaces, but you will never see them, they are not large colonies, they are extremely small individuals.

What is the area left to increase surface area? The filter!

One more Little Test

What common things in our house could we use to increase the surface area?

My wife was working on re-stuffing a pillow with that artificial white fiber fill material which I was already using for filter material because of the fine fibers.

A typical filter contains some cotton or fiber material to filter out fine particles. I had replaced the expensive cotton with the inexpensive fiber fill with good results.

The results were staggering! (Most of the time at least.) The water was crystal clear and the fish and plants thrived.

Eureka! I found it! Gold! (Apologies to Archimedes.)

OK, so it was pyrite, but it was good for now.

I started selling plants back to the fish store every few weeks. Things were developing just fine for several months then suddenly, bang! I woke up one day to find a very dirty aquarium. Everyone was fine (all of the "fin people" inside that is), but the water was very dirty.

Obviously the filter had failed, but how?

On examination I found the biological load of the fiber fill had increased beyond the structural capacity of the fiber. It was just too much organic material. So I simply replaced the material and within hours we were back to a clean aquarium!

Now there is an old axiom that goes like this: If you keep doing what you have been doing, you will keep getting what you have been getting.

True to the axiom, I kept getting what I was getting because I kept doing what I was doing. Was it worth it to get this ultra-clean aquarium only to have it go bad once or twice a year? Remember it wasn't a biological criticality problem, that is, the fish and the plants were fine as were the bacteria at work, it just looked bad until I got around to changing the material and the bacteria had more to eat in the tank.

Yuck!

Well, yes, it was. Why? Because now I was only working on my aquarium when it needed trimming, or when the filter needed changing every 6-8 months. I was saving about $15-$20 dollars every month as well as time shopping for aquarium supplies and many hours every week, and lots of water.

I'm good with this and along I tuned for a few years.

Step Five, Finally Fine Filter Finality!

Just a disclaimer to inject here: Nothing is perfect, at least on earth, so nothing is trouble free. There is always the results of the Second Law to deal with (everything becomes more disorganized in time).

What I needed was something with the surface area of the fiber fill, but with more structural strength. I didn't mind something artificial like the fiber fill if it was stable and I didn't have to throw it away, but every 6-8 months was OK. Could this be improved?

Someone had given us a lot of kitchen sponges. I don't remember why, but they were sitting in the garage. I was working in the garage one day and spotted the sponges. On top is that green scratch pad. I'm always up for another experiment so I stripped a few off and loaded them like a Dagwood Sandwich between the fiber fill. It looked a little ridiculous and as I completed the new filter design the answer became obvious for two reasons. First, I was compressing the fiber so I had to use less and less of it, and second, it was obvious that this material passed water easily, was almost as fine as the fiber fill and, there was no way organic detritus would make it collapse, it is simply too strong, I had used them to clean for years with significant pressure and it always bounced back.

I completed the test with little fiber between them then, like a dutiful husband asked my wife, "where can I get this stuff without the sponge?"

As a man, I was embarrassed and humiliated when she said "Lowes" after all, men are supposed to memorize everything on the shelf of the hardware super store, right?

Sure to form (you wife is always right, remember that guys), they had bags of the stuff neatly loaded into stacks for the picking. Could the ultimate filter material right on the self at Lowes? I didn't know, it looked promising but I had . . .

One More Test to Do

For brevity I have used only one aquarium for this story, but I was actually keeping one at home, one at work, and one at a museum in Santee (east of San Diego). So finding a solution to this problem saved me a lot of time.

Would it work? I turned on the aquarium and nothing happened. The water came flowing through at a rapid rate, the fish started "swimming upstream" toward the inflow pipe, and everyone was happy. Within an hour I could see my super clear water actually improving.

So at the end of my journey I have a beautiful aquarium that is almost maintenance free.

So, the next big secret is, fill the filter container with scratch pad material (usually a 3M nylon product) and forget everything else. Now, if you are no dummy, you will get various roughness of this material, mostly the fine dark green stuff, and put some of the rougher material at the beginning of the water flow area in the filter to capture more detritus and help with water flows.

Also, fill up the space as well as possible to prevent water from flowing around this material. You don't care what it looks like, you care how it functions.

This area with rougher material allows larger organics to be trapped and degrade quite out of sight. Only small organic particles could pass through and they are trapped in the green material and degraded there into CO2, humates, small acids based on CO2 like myristic acid, palmic acid, steric acid, pivalic acid, oxalic acid, malonic acid, succinic acid, glutaric acid, adipic acid, pimelic acid, suberic acid, azelaic acid, propiolic acid, and so on, and some phenolic acids, also with CO2 such as hydratropic acid (2-phenylpropaoic acid), atropic acid (2-phenylpropenoic acid), and others, plus large molecules such as fluvic acid, and the converse, alkali bases and salts from the combination of an acid and a base. The materials are all broken down if the right environment is provided and recycled into their basic constituents.

Step Six, Stones, Substrate, Soils, & Sand

Loren Nancarrow, a local TV personality and I had talked about Humic Acid on his radio show and all three kids had entered and won awards at the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair for work on humates and humic substances. There is a segment on humates later in the book, for now let's just say they are the organic remains in humus. They make plants grow faster and they inhibit algae growth.

I was using gravel at the time without the under gravel filter because anaerobic bacteria (without oxygen) in the substrate make ammonia and ammonium from the nitrates and nitrites in the tank from the fish. Also, in an anaerobic substrate, the organics make CO2, which the plants thrive on.

MULCH? Are you crazy?

While I can't answer that question directly, my mother always thought so. While my brother played baseball, I climbed cliffs, then rocks, and so on, so it is a valid question.

OK, call me crazy, but the typical gravel thing wasn't going to work with mulch so I used sand over the mulch. We had started experimenting with fermenting leaves in water to make humates and my son had already proved this was an algaecide (See Appendix 1) as well as a plant fertilizer (yes, it is selective), so why not make the humates right in the tank.

I was now growing plants that were "slow growers" like Cryptocorynes by the handful. I would sell so many to the plant stores I was driving down the local price for these plants. On top of that they grew twice the size they should have been. People misidentified the species because of their size.

Later I changed to swimming pool filter sand and we were there.

About this time I hear of the quintessential plant guy in the world, Takashi Amano. If you every have the chance, at least look at his books, if not buy every one you find. He is an artist with his aquarium designs and in his photography, absolutely fabulous.

I then used a less expensive method: I took and old apple juice container, dumped in a few pounds of sugar, some yeast, water, cut a small hole into the top, stuck in an air tube left over from the bubbler days, used silicon seal on it and put the tube into the tank. I tucked this into the filter uptake to ensure all of it was used (picture above) I can't claim this as my own, other people on-line had shared this with me. This works too.

I played with potassium carbonate, sodium chloride, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), magnesium sulfate (Epson salt), iron compounds, trace minerals, humic acid, tea, and other things for fertilizer, all with good results, but again, don't bother.

Yes, the plants grow faster, but again, too much work (or expense) for too little payback.

Amano also used fertilizers. His tanks are pristine because he changes water daily, and you can't argue with success, unless you are, like me, a lazy aquarist.

I don't care if there is a little detritus on the bottom of the tank, I have so many plants it really doesn't detract from the views.

The mulch idea was tested in three tanks and worked quite well. Then I found a book on-line titled Ecology of the Planted Aquarium by Diana Walstad. This is a good book if you like detailed discussions of various aspects of what you are reading here. She does a very good job of research and presentation.

She recommended actually using soils in the aquarium. So, again, with only one tank I reworked the aquarium added a layer of mulch, then soil, then sand to keep it all down. This was a lot of work for a lazy guy like me, but again the results were really quite good as long as you don't disturb the bottom. If you do, you have mud.

The trouble was, plants grew so fast, you had to thin them out and this disturbed the bottom. The Cryptocoryne I was growing was supposed to be 6" tall, they were 18" tall and propagated like crab grass. When I took them in to sell them, the mass of plants was a solid block 8 inches wide and nearly 3 feet long, so we broke it into several hundred plants and the shop sold them for ten cents each, normally they sell for $1.25 or so. The Ambulia grew in all directions rapidly. Again, more mulch for the garden.

So much for soil, unless you are not lazy and like reworking your aquarium one a year or so.

We seemed to have all the pieces together. We had organic detritus from the plants and fishes to feed the bacteria and recycle the materials, carbons compounds, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, trace elements, sand alone should work and using clean sand from the swimming pool supply shop would produce a bright white bottom.

In several tanks over the years U put a fine mud over mulch with sand over this, again, unbelievable plant growth, but then the plants needed to be removed because they were too large, and removing them disturbed the bottom and clouded the tank. Not good.

One more test: Would sand alone work?

It did work. Plants grew somewhat slower, more controlled, but still faster that I needed. The water was clean and the aquarium looks great! Any plant the covers the bottom shields the eyes from too much detritus, the anaerobic bottom allows the plants to have the ammonia they need, the aerobic open water area takes care of any excess nitrogen in the tank and now, I change my water once or twice a year.

This little trek had taken more years than I care to tell you, but now I can present to you a simple lazy person's method of keeping an outstanding tank.

Let's Do It!