The Experiment

So you may remember that I put a small aquarium in my little office.

More about the office aquarium soon.

What I really want is a 75 - 90 gallon freshwater planted setup, with a soft slightly acidic water theme. This is similar to the water you would find in the Amazon.

Now for the fun part. Water in Miami is hard as a brick and has a high PH. My tap water is filtered through millions of tons of limestone. So 90 gallons of soft, slightly acidic water is not exactly going to fall from the sky.

So what I did was set up a 5 1/2 gallon experimental aquarium at home. With such a small tank, I can play with holding the PH at 6.7 or 6.8 to see just how much of a pain in the ass that will be. And the best part was I already had all the stuff I needed without having to buy anything.

Here are the details:

Lights - two 13 watt power compacts at 5500k and 6700k.
Gravel - Seachem Flourite (red)
Water chemistry - PH 6.7
Plant supplements - API "Leaf Zone" and Seachem Flourish Excel

I filled the tank with distilled water, because distilled water has nothing in it. It has nothing to buffer PH or hardness. Therefore, it is easy to work with.

I used some Seachem Discus Buffer and Seachem neutral Buffer to set the PH to 6.7. The Discus Buffer is made to work with the neutral buffer to hold the PH at any level from 6.8 - 5.5, depending on the ratio of neutral buffer to discus buffer used. As for hardness, the discus buffer has compounds in it that tend to lower general hardness, while the neutral buffer has compounds that tend to prevent PH swings.

So far, the experiment is working out OK. Set up exactly like the 5 1/2, a 90 gallon would be fairly expensive. but I could cut some corners. For one, Flourite is expensive. $16 for a 15 pound bag. I used most of the bag for the little tank, so a 90 gallon tank could require at least 15 bags or more. To reduce this I could mix the Flourite with regular gravel 50/50, or special order larger bags from some internet supplier. Another option is to use regular cheap gravel and supplement it myself with stuff from a garden supply store.

Here is what the experiment tank looks like now. The fish you can see are neon tetras and a dwarf honey flame gourami. If you click the photo it will open up a larger photo, where you can see my Glo-Fish hiding behind the neon tetra towards the top of the tank.

Glo-Fish is a genetically modified zebrafish. A researcher spliced some jellyfish DNA into some zebrafish eggs - all to make the internal organs easy to see. The result was a pinkish/red FrankenFish creature. They say it will glow in the dark if you "charge" the fish with some UV light. But the Glo-Fish like the same water conditions as regular zebrafish, which makes them easy to keep.