Starting a planted tank.

Welcome to my first blog! I finally have something more interesting than my day-to-day life and the musings of my demented mind to share with the world. I am going to be setting up a planted aquarium. This is something that might be quite an imposing task even for those who already keep fish, and the hobby does not have a large following in South Africa. If you want to see why I would like to do this, look no further then the works of Takashi Amano for inspiration. Incidentally, my girlfriend and I already have 7 tanks between us, all of which have real plants in them, so I'm not completely new to the hobby. I've only been involved in fish keeping for about a year and my quick start is due to the expert knowledge of and assistance from Hartlands Aquatics. Also note that I don't have bags of cash so although what I do should be possible for most people, it also means that I can't always go out and order the most expensive equipment.

I would like to accomplish several things in the entries of this blog.

Firstly, I hope that my experience will be helpful to others who want to set up a tank like this one. From this blog you should get a perfect textbook on how to set up a mind-blowingly beautiful planted aquarium. Of course, you may also end up with a set of documents to consult every time you want to know how to obtain a hideous, algae-infested eyesore filled with dead fish and rotting plant matter. However, any scientist will tell you that experiments with negative results are just as valuable as those with positive results, so either way this should be a useful resource.

Secondly, I hope to be able to point South African readers in Cape Town to places where good equipment, hardscape and plants can be obtained locally. Maybe you too have tortured yourself browsing the websites of aquarium stores overseas or drooling over some ADA glasswork.... I don't think I have any ground-breaking secrets to share for anyone who is already involved in fish-keeping in Cape Town, but hopefully I can provide a useful list of places to visit.

I will try and detail everything I do with photos and not take anything for granted. For this post, I will discuss the tank itself. It was made by Roly's Aquariums who, in my experience, make the best and cheapest easily available tanks in Cape Town. I bought it through Hartlands Aquatics. It measures 100cm x 600cm at the base and is 450cm high. The bottom is made with 10mm glass and the sides with 6mm glass. The top and bottom are re-enforced on all sides with strips of 12mm glass. Obviously it has a layer of polystyrene siliconed to the bottom. I placed the tank on a table with a solid wood top and a metal frame on a cement floor. If the table doesn't hold up then this blog might be over a lot sooner then I anticipated. :)

I used a spirit level to check that the tank is level. As you can see from the photo I checked this quite late. It would be best to address structural questions before starting to set up the tank to avoid having to move it later on.

That about wraps it up for this post. I will leave you with a photo showing some of the equipment I bought for the tank which will hopefully get you to come back for another entry (if my enthralling prose has not already got you bookmarking this blog).