A lot has been happening.....

I will be updating this blog as soon as I get a moment. More details to follow but eureka, I have finally found a seriously quiet air pump. I'll do a bit of a review with some noise measurements within the next week.

I now have Orange Eye Royal Blue Tigers, Super Red Tigers and my Taiwans are breeding. And today my Benibachi PRLs are due to arrive.

I am also looking at setting up some more breeding tanks. Alan at Keen Shrimp has developed an automated system which sound very impressive. For an amateur like me something much simpler will be the order of the day although I do want to find a way of reducing the time taken for water changes.

Shortly I should have quotes for a couple of 200L tanks which will be subdivided in to 5 or 6 compartments by glass divisions which leave a gap at the bottom. The gap will be covered by substrate but of course water can flow through. This way I get a much larger body of water and can carry out the water change on all the tanks at the same time.

The disadvantage is of course that I will risk a problem being transmitted to all the tanks.

Sorry that this is short. More stuff including photos to follow.

Thanks to an "outage" at UPS the PRL did not arrive on Friday. To add insult, and shrimp stress, they were sent from Eastleigh to Tamworth to Exeter. A round trip of 650km (400mls)! All over a very hot weekend with temperatures at home well above 30C.

As I write this the Benibachi PRL are acclimatising over 4 hours using the drip technique. They were all alive when I opened up the packing but two have subsequently died so I am now down to 13. Hopefully the survivors will settle in well. My supplier advised me to take the TDS up to 250ppm to help the poor little things through their moult.

TDS is at 160 right now so I will be adding a pinch of GH+ every day and leave everything at that level for a month and then gradually bring it back down.

I've just found a rather fine video of CRS moulting. Go to here, well worth a look.

Getting Ready for PRL

I mentioned before that the Dennerle Nano 60L was going to make way for a TMC 80L. The deed has been done! The first thing to do was to upgrade the air pump. As my intention was to drive an undergravel and an HMF Mobile I needed more oomph than could be provided by the Tetra. Testing, in the bath, demonstrated that this little monkey would certainly do the trick. I  hate pump noise so I sourced some MDF boxes and lined them with a heavy sound deadening material and voila! Minimal pump noise.

Undergravel and HMF ready I then poured Red Bee Sand (absolutely nothing like sand!) around the edges having sprinkled Mont M powder on the filter bed.

The substrate from the Dennerle was only 6 or 8 weeks old so I then "reclaimed" some of this substrate to seed the new undergravel.

A decent sprinkling of Bacteria Bee 3 followed and finally a good depth of Red Bee Sand.

I had been conditioning the wood in the previous tank and had already tied on some moss. Hopefully I will now have a new tank which will mature fairly quickly.

The immediately obvious issue was a need for more light. Whilst the Aquaray Tile was fine on the Dennerle it is clearly struggling on the larger tank. I will therefore be doubling up with a second Tile.

The Tile is 10000K colour temperature as opposed to the Aquagrows on my other tanks which run generate 6500K. I feel that this may be a better white balance for showing off the PRLs and for photography.

All I need now is a bit of patience although it will probably be a little while before the PRLs arrive. The whole set up is now working as planned. One thing which is for certain is that this tank will not be under filtered.

The water flow from the filter outlets looks to be about right. I haven't yet measured the flow but I will do so within the next few days..