# My 5g Nano office tank



## pianomav (Feb 15, 2008)

Here's my 5g nano tank that i've started a couple months ago. It keeps me sane at work now ;-) 
I'm trying to get an HC carpet and it's finally taking off after a month of slow growth. I guess it's probably due to the emmersed to submersed transition. Other plants are growing really fast and these plants suck nutrients like crazy ;-)
I just ordered some aquafilters to automate the dosing since I'm only at work 5 days a week. Having access to some power relays is really cool since I can write a program to get the pumps to dose in small dosage. 
By the way, the zoomed is a fabulous filter.. i love this thing. Quiet like a mouse. Also the haggen ladder is so cool,, with the tiny bubbles climbing up as it diffuse. 

*Here are the specs:*
5g acrylic (modified eclipse 5g)
filter: ZooMed 501 cannister
substrate: regular gravel
Ferts: Seachem line (N,P,K, flourish comp., Iron) + excel daily
Light: Catalina 24W (8 hrs)
CO2: DIY 2ltr w/hagen ladder.

*Flora:*
HC
HM
Ludwidgia Repens
Ludwidgia Arcuata
Bacopa Caroliniana
Hygro Polysperma (green)
Hygro Sunset
Anubia nana petite
Java fern
erio cinereum (newly added)

*Fauna:*
RCS (3)
Ghost Shrim (4)
Guppy (1 adult, 20 fry ;-) 
few friendly snails
And here are some pics of the tank using my crappy point&shoot camera. Forgive the pic quality...


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## Mueller777 (Feb 6, 2008)

Looks good to me dude.... What kinda substrait do you use?


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## John7429 (Jan 11, 2008)

Looks very nice!


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## pianomav (Feb 15, 2008)

Mueller777 said:


> Looks good to me dude.... What kinda substrait do you use?


Thanks Mueller. It's just plain gravel (top fin brand, i think?) that I got from petsmart. Most of the nutrients are from the water column via ferts. But it works, HC is growing pretty good.


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## pianomav (Feb 15, 2008)

John7429 said:


> Looks very nice!


thanks!


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## Fishy_Fun (Feb 9, 2008)

that looks great.thanks for sharing


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## alang (Nov 25, 2007)

Tanks looks great.

What size tubing does the Zoomed filter use?

In some of the pics I have seen, it looks really small, but you have what looks like a 1/2" spraybar and pick up.

Did the spraybar and pickup come with the filter?


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## Kayen (Oct 14, 2007)

The hygro looks more like "rosanverg" to me.. the green hygro doesn't have the white veins on the leaves.
Very ncie start to the tank : D


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## pianomav (Feb 15, 2008)

Fishy_Fun said:


> that looks great.thanks for sharing


Thanks Fishy...



alang said:


> Tanks looks great.
> 
> What size tubing does the Zoomed filter use?
> 
> ...


Yes i believe it's 1/2" tube spray bar and pick-up. It's definitely larger than the standard airline tubing. Spray bar and the intake comes with the filter. 



Viettxboii said:


> The hygro looks more like "rosanverg" to me.. the green hygro doesn't have the white veins on the leaves.
> Very ncie start to the tank : D


Thanks Viettxboii. The 'green' hygro is the one on the right front side. They're really green compared to the Sunset hygro which is all over the place.


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## Kayen (Oct 14, 2007)

ah the lighting made that bush on the right more ambiguous. I got the green hygro overruning my 2.5 right now =].
Good luck with the tank can't wait to see it fill in!


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## FrostyNYC (Nov 5, 2007)

Pianomav, really a great looking little tank. Is the Hygro Polysperma the plant in the lower right? Whatever that is, I like it.


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## Bk828 (Mar 11, 2008)

Very nice tank. so clean and green.
Watch the cherries with the ghost shrimp.. Mine ate the cherries like kebabs


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## ununknown (Mar 26, 2008)

Nice Tank!



pianomav said:


> And here are some pics of the tank using my crappy point&shoot camera. Forgive the pic quality...


And is that a joke? The quality of the pic is perfect!


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## pianomav (Feb 15, 2008)

FrostyNYC said:


> Pianomav, really a great looking little tank. Is the Hygro Polysperma the plant in the lower right? Whatever that is, I like it.


Thanks Frosty. Yes, that's the green hygro in the lower right. It grows bigger but I try to trim it once a week to keep it low and small. That's a fast grower and non demanding plant and it has a nice light green color to it. 



Bk828 said:


> Very nice tank. so clean and green.
> Watch the cherries with the ghost shrimp.. Mine ate the cherries like kebabs


Thanks Bk. So far no casualties on the red cherries. I guess as long as I keep the ghost shrimp happy and fed, they don't really bother the cherries. But the RCS are more fun to look at than the ghost shrimps that's for sure!



ununknown said:


> Nice Tank!
> 
> 
> And is that a joke? The quality of the pic is perfect!


Thanks!


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## PhiShY92 (Mar 2, 2008)

i simply love this tank keep it up


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## pianomav (Feb 15, 2008)

PhiShY92 said:


> i simply love this tank keep it up


Thanks Phishy. 

Here's an update of the tank. HC is still spreading pretty good and the other plants are growing like crazy especially the stem plants. One of my petite nanas seemed to have rot for some reason. Rhizome's not buried either but it just turned brown and rotted away..hmmm. I've never seen my java ferns so nice and green and it even has plantlets on some leaves... cool.

Two things came in the mail today (wohoo!). One is the erio cinereum plant (the one with the spiky leaves) and the other is the aqua lifter pumps for my autodoser (more on the aqau lifters later..).

The erio is a lovely plant as you can see in the picture. You gotta have this plant in a nano! I'm hoping on propagating this and have it on several places in the foreground together with the HC. Maybe I'll just turn this into a nano erio tank ;-) ..who knows!

Here's a picture of the tank .. click here for higher res











And finally the aqua lifters setup. I bought 3 aqua filters to do my autodoser. I bought 3 because they're relatively cheap and works pretty well as far as pumping water to a certain height. 

As far as the fert setup, I have 2 bottles with mixed and diluted seachem ferts that's calculated for 8 weeks worth of dosing. One bottle contains N,Fe, Flourish comp, and Excel (dosed 3 times a week). The other contains Ph and K and dosed twice a week. Once this is stable, I plan on increasing the amount of mixed ferts so it would go longer. 

Here's the setup with the aqua lifters in my work cube ;-) . 











And here's where it gets dumped .. I have it taped to the intake of my canister filter. It doesn't touch water to prevent the water from being siphon'ed back. 










As far as the dosing scheme, I have the first mixture dosing 3 times a week and the other bottle dosing twice a week. This is controlled using a power relay and a program that I wrote to flip the switch in seconds and to dose on particular days I've designated. The program has a manual mode that allows me to dose extra amount if needed. 

So far it's working pretty good. Now to figure out how to automate the trimming .....


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## John7429 (Jan 11, 2008)

Wow

Great job.


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## Darkblade48 (Jan 4, 2008)

Great job with the tank, I'd like to know more about the Aqualifter auto dosing system though. Did you put them on a timer (say 1 minute, every other day) or something? How do you control the amount of fertilizer that you are dispensing each time?


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## pianomav (Feb 15, 2008)

John7429 said:


> Wow
> 
> Great job.


Thanks John.



Darkblade48 said:


> Great job with the tank, I'd like to know more about the Aqualifter auto dosing system though. Did you put them on a timer (say 1 minute, every other day) or something? How do you control the amount of fertilizer that you are dispensing each time?


I know some people in this forum have done it (using aqua lifter pump) with timers that can be set in minute intervals. However due to the size of my tank and the small dose amounts, I needed to be able to dose in small amounts and I couldn't do that with mechanical timers. (Note that in my setup, the aqualifter pumps 1mil/sec. This might vary depending on the location/elevation of the pumps) 

Fortunately, my line of work deals with automation and I have access to power relays that's controllable using a standard rs232 serial signal. So using a proprietary sw that we use at work, i wrote a little sw program that would turn on the power relays that powers the aqualifters 3 times a week (tues, thurs, sat) for 7 secs each time. The other pump is turned on twice a week (wed, frid) for 9 secs. 

I guess the mechanical timers would work for bigger tanks (higher dosage) and the aqualifters are excellent for that application. Once my seachem ferts run out, i'll probably switch to pps-pro and dose daily using this same setup.


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## Sticky230 (Mar 30, 2008)

with the hagen ladder, how are your co2 levels? high? and where do you have the output from the co2 line hooked up, all the way at the bottom or one of the other two settings?


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