Why pay someone when you can spend much more doing it yourself? Part 3

I was anxious to get the tank cycling (read about the Nitrogen Cycle Here) so I filled it the rest of the way and got some plants and feeder guppies in there.

I moved a lot of the plants I had in my ten-gallon tank over. They're suffering now because since I couldn't see to plant them due to the mud issue, they spent a lot of time just floating instead of getting planted. In addition, every time I need to move the tank or adjust something, I end up unplugging everything - the heater and the filter - so they've essentially starved and frozen. I've got things essentially settled in there now so we'll have to see what survives and starts to grow.

this is what the stand looks like now. It's seen a lot of changes.

1. We had to increase the height of the stand below the tank to accomodate a Canister Filter.

Until Last week or the week before, we had just been using a basic water pump, which doesn't allow for the growth of nearly as much beneficial bacteria. Also, the pump we were using was noisy and ugly and generally not what we wanted. I ordered a pump off of E-bay thinking it was a model that I'd heard a lot about but that the seller didn't know it's name so hadn't listed it. When we got it, it was a knock-off from china that had instructions poorly translated from Chinese. It also (at different times) leaked, refused to pump, and flooded our carpet. I tried and tried to modify it to work but finally gave up and bought a Rena XP3, which is working beautifully as I knew it would. Lesson learned: in Filters, you get what you pay for. It's worth coughing up the extra money for a decent filter.

2: the grow bed that I had on the Window was now shaded and blocked by the taller stand so the lights above it couldn't help it grow. That's why we came up with the idea of moving the tank to a wall, then suspending the grow bed above the tank. The other reason we did this is that another version of Grow Bed that we'd tried was to get some long planter boxes and put them on a frame directly in the top of the fish tank so that the water would only come part-way up the planter box and the plants could have the water's nutrients and the air at the same time. This sort of worked, but in combination with the Do-it-Yourself lights, it completely blocked the top of the tank so that we couldn't re-plant anything or feed the fish. for this reason also, we moved the grow bed above the tank.

3. In the new tank stand, I have mounted power strips near the roof, so that the wires can stay somewhat organized without much chance of getting wet (unless the water is aimed directly at them, which is unlikely).

4: You can't see it in the picture, but there is an in-line heater behind the tank to add a bit of redundancy. If the in-tank heater fails (or vice-versa), there's another one to keep everything alive and running smoothly.

Future Plans:

I still need to set up plumbing from the grow bed to the tank. I will use 1" PVC for most of the drain and will build a Bell Siphon around the drains or maybe just a constant flow drain if 2-3 1 inch drains will be enough to prevent things from flooding. Either way the pipe will guide the water downward either at the front or back of the grow bed and back into the fish tank. I'm partial to the drains being at the back so that I can hide them in the tank with plants, but then I'll need more tubing going from the filter to the spraybar in the grow bed and I'm not sure what that would do to the canister filter's siphon process.