The Build

The day came for the big build, 17/02/2007, I decided to ask a friend over to help me purely because of the size/ weight aspect of this tank 200l of fluid is a lot and filling this on your own will take a while. After building the stand we slid the tank into place using my hand drawn plan decided how best to start adding substrate. You can see my plan here I wanted to use a mixture of substrates:

• Red Sea Flora Base Plant Aquarium Substrate
• Pea Gravel
• Brown shale gravel
  

I started with a general layer to the planet area of flora base substrate and then covered it and the rest of the base with shale. The building area (to the right) was then covered with pea gravel. Even though i had to wait over a week for my slate to make the built section i still added the pea gravel so it would help the tank settle and the filter mature.

After the gravel we added the filter intake/output pipes and the thermometer.

Then it was the simple task of adding the 180 or so litres of water and then HUD. A tip i would like to offer is to use a pan sat on top of a large plate this will help when minimise displacement of your substrate when you add your water. Using the Hagen 205 external filter the water returned to its gin clear colour within 12hrs, it is a very good filter!!!

On day two i added 3 potted Java Ferns but this really was to add a bit of colour for my sake and build up the bacteria in the filter. In the future these will be added to wood or some of the stonework to add some much needed colour.

Once everything is settled in place then it was a simple task of sit and wait... 2 weeks for my slate.