We’ve had some issues with my planted tank the past few months. Mostly related to neglect/lack of interest, or so I thought.
Lost a few plants, and the anubias keep getting covered with a brown, easily wiped off, slime algae. Yuck!
Then, the lights died. Both of the T5HO fixtures died. I replaced them with a new LED light, and immediately realized the light bulbs had aged out in terms of quality light production long before the fixtures died!
We knew from keeping a reef tank in the 90s that lights go bad, that their light output goes down over time. We bought enough metal halide bulbs over the years to know that!
But, I forgot. And so the problems began. And now are on the way to being resolved.
In other tank news, confident that we know the cause of the recent tank problems, we went ahead and ordered a new tank! More about that in a future post, but there’s a picture at the end of this post as a tease. It’s not as large as the photo might indicate. It’s a rimless tank, 30 inches wide and holds 32 gallons.
The rest of the pictures are of the current setup, temporarily housed in a 15 gallon tank pending installation of the new (80 pound!) tank. As you can see, the LED lighting is very bright, and includes some red LEDs to improve the color of both the plants and fish.
More on the new tank setup in a future post, for now, enjoy these photos.
