About a year later, and I have moved to a new location. At this point, I have kind of taken a break from my aquarium hobby for a while. While the fish has not gotten more attention than their bi-weekly water change and daily feeding. I decided to take a rest from the hobby after the previous spawning fiasco. Thus I focused on other hobbies for this year.
At some point, someone I knew through my friend group asked if someone had space to house an aquarium they found for cheap. Since I don’t use a lot of the space I have available, and enjoy watching aquariums I offered to keep this aquarium in my appartment and got a new friend in the process. At this point, I decided it was long due to give my Discus the tank upgrade they deserved for a while. So I started looking for a large tank and planned out how I wanted it to look…
I knew I wanted to have two diffenent looking areas. And I wanted one of them to be featuring different levels of height and look sort of like a reef plateu. While the second area should be a bit more of a forest type area where the fish could seek refuge and hide if they felt like it. I designed this layout using the Unity Game Engine since it allowed me to place and simulate how I wanted the look without the physics issues I would be facing with trial and error from doing it in the aquarium.
As for the actual assembly of this aquarium, I had to build a custom stand for it together with my dad. I also needed some material to take up the majority of the layered area, as I didn’t want to fill it with dense sand to prevent gas buildup issues. And lastly, I needed to mount the cables to my wall, and the light armature to the roof. Here are some images from that process…
After the decorations were in, there was a thick layer of dust that had to clear up. This took around a full week to completely settle, but eventually it all cleared up and was looking fairly close to what I was trying to achieve, so I am quite happy about this aquarium.
I decided some time after to install a few strips of RGB-led lights behind the aquarium for added effect. This will allow me to make it look like the aquarium has a deep sea look. Which was quite pleasing. Though I don’t actually use these too often as the fish seems to become come somewhat stressed from lights comming from the side.
I bought some new species of Discus that I want to try raise into another pair as well as a few Neon Tetras to accompany them. As they add a bit more activity to the otherwise fairly calm tank. Eventually some snails seems to have moved in from somewhere as a surprice. But I don’t mind, as I don’t intend on adding any cleaning fish to prevent eggs from being stolen. Here are some more images, showing the final results…
