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..