Journal: 1.5 Feet planted tank re-scape (with ADA amazonia + Shirui)

Motivation
My biggest motivation of re-scape coming from an inspiration by a nice planted tank I saw personally when I bought a used LED light from a aquascaper. Beside, my first 1.5 feet planted tank has been run for 1.5 years. Recently, the aqua scape shown it age when the plant starting to melt down and the fire red shrimps no longer that productive. My suspect is the soil has lost it's nutrient and buffering capability. I am taking the rescape opportunity to get rid of the mini ramhorn snails, thanks to the plants I got from local LFS.


Tank before re-work

Tank after re-work

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Setting up freshwater (Benibachi) shrimp tank: Set-up

Setting up a freshwater shrimp tank start with the equipments selection and if you have miss out this post, proceed to this page to check out. With the complete equipment, next task is to set things up. This post will show the step of setting up a Benibachi based tank. 



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Setting up freshwater (Benibachi) shrimp tank: Equipments

Setting up a freshwater shrimp tank start with getting the right equipments. I'll share the thought that cross my mind when I am on equipment selection for my shrimp tank. For this tank, I planned to raise a higher grade shrimp (Black King Kong, Wine Red, Pure red line .. etc), so, I chooses the substrate specially for shrimp from Benibachi. Full text in read more.

Preview of the equipments chosen for 2 feet tank. 

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DIY shrimp drip acclimate tool

Getting new shrimps is always very exciting (ofcourse put the cost topic aside). It can be very rewarding when you see the new shrimps scavenging happily in your tank. But patient is always needed when introducing the new shrimps to the tank. They can't be happy if you just put them directly into the new tank without acclimating them. 

Acclimating Shrimps

Although the water just look alike, water that come with the shrimps has different water parameter (content) and temperature compare to the water in your tank. Water is the environment that shrimps live in, so, to adapt to its' new environment, shrimps need to slowly adjusting itself to suite the new environment. Sudden change to new environment can lead to shock and even death to the shrimps. Sometime it take time for the shrimps to death if the shrimps is not acclimating well.

The acclimation I used to practise is for every 10 minutes introducing some new tank water to the original water that come with shrimps. Each time, around  10% to 15% of the water volume (considering original water volume is 100%) is introduced. After 2-3 hours, the water volume will become 200%-300% of the original water, then, I only take up the shrimps and introduce the shrimps to my new tank. From my experience, the shrimps are doing good in the new tank with this style of acclimating but my only complain is I needed to pour some water in for every 10 minutes. Thus, I decided to do a shrimp drip acclimate tool which will slowly dripping new tank water to the original water. This is a low cost and simple DIY which can be done under RM 6 (~USD 2) and less than 10 minutes setup time. Check out the equipment list and setup step as below

Equipment

1) 1 measuring cup with handle - RM3.50

2) 1 normal container - Free
3) The air pump valve - RM 0.30
4) Air pump tube - RM 1.50
5) Sucker (optional) - RM0.20

Container with handle can be easily obtained at shopping mall or baking shop. I got mine at hardware shop which the container is used to measure the water volume. The sucker, air pump valve, air pump tube can be easily obtained from local fish shop.

Proceed to read more to find out the set-up

Sumo PRL (Pure Red Line) - Male or Female?

Finding a local fish shop that sell a quality shrimps with reasonable price is not that easy. Once you found that shop and thinking to get few male and few female shrimps so that they can breed, the next question coming into your mind is, how am I going to differentiate the male and female? If you getting a large quantity of them, more than 10, there's no doubt that there will be a mixture of male and female, but if you get less than 5, there's chance that none of them is male or female. Beside be able to seximg them is also important when you go into selective breeding 

Sexing attributes

PlanetInverts has a very good guideline (Link) on how to sexing them. You can go to the link to get the detail explanation and diagrams. I would just summarize the attributes that can be use to sex the shrimps 

From PlanetInverts

1) The "Saddle"
Female shrimp has a "saddle" (or miniature undeveloped eggs in the ovaries) appear on the back of the shrimp, behind the head.

2) Curved Underbelly

To carry and protect the egg, the female developed more curved underbelly.

3) Size & Coloration: 

Rule of tumb, the female is typically larger, darker, prettier than the male. 

Learning from the owner of a local fish shop.

4) Head ratio

Female shrimp have larger head, and a larger head to body ratio compare to male

Sexing PRL

I'll put this theory into use to differentiate the gender of my Sumo PRL. Here's 4 pieces of specimen, let's take a look and analysis (or guess) the sexes of them. I'll do some speculation as well but the sexes will remain mystery until it berried (carry eggs) 

Sumo PRL 1:

Sumo PRL 2:

Sumo PRL 3:

Sumo PRL 4:

Analysis and guess

• PRL 1 is a male and PRL 2 is a female
• Compare with PRL 2, the PRL 1 has smaller head to body ratio. 
• PRL 2 have a more curved underbelly compare with PRL 1 as well
• PRL 3 is a male
• It has a smaller head to body ratio.
• It look slim and has no underbelly
• PRL 4 is a female
• It has more curved and fat underbelly  

Summary
From the sexing attributes that I manage to gather so far, I can't find a definite answer to tell us that particular shrimps is male or female. Most of the sexing attributes is based on the comparison between shrimps. Although there's an exception on if saddle appear than we can confirm it's a female, saddle is not able to be noticed with most of the Caridina species due to it solid colour on the back of the shrimps head. You may have different guess, speculation than me. The seasonal shrimps keeper or shrimps breeder may even have the definitive answer. So, to be able to sex them correctly, you need to be experience enough on shrimps keeping so that the comparison (based on the shrimps you approach before) can be clearer. And what's the answer for my PRL sexes? I don't know for now but will definitely update this post once they berried  

Aquarium Chiller: Resun CL 650 vs Hailea HS 28A

Overview

Hailea and Resun is the more affordable brand of chiller. Both brand is originated from China. Coincidentally, I managed to get my hand on both brand chiller at the same time and thus manage to do a head to head comparison.

The chiller that I am going to compare is Hailea HS-28A and Recun CL-650. From the specification itself, the Hailea is running with 1/10 HP and Resun with 1/4 HP, it's clearly not a apple to apple compare. But since I need to choose either 1 for it for the shrimp tank, decision must be made.

The chiller need to power up my 2 feet tank (with 80 liter water), running with the Eheim 2215 (flow rate 600l/h) filter. Both chiller are actually enough power for my tank, infact more than enough. 

My selection will be based on priority as below
1) Noise Level
2) Appearance (Because it need to sit on my small living room)

Specification
Let's the specification speak itself

Model	Hailea HS-28A	Resun CL-650
Power	1/10 HP	1/4 HP
Voltage	220-240V	220-240V
Working Watt	240w	600w
Iced Medium	R134a	R134a
Max Water Refrigerated	400 L	650 L
Recommended flow rate	1000-1500 L/hr	200-1200 L/hr
Size	400x220x350 mm	325x365x400 mm

HS-28a manual - Link (In chinese)
CL-650 manual - Link

Appearance
Casing
HS-28a is with black casing and silver front grill.
CL-650 whole unit is in black.

Display panel
HS-28a display panel is with blue LED showing 3 digit and come with 1 decimal place.
CL-650 display panel is with the old-style red LED and showing only 2 digits.

HS-28a is a newer product in market while CL-650 is around been a while and has built it reputation. It's a clear win to HS-28a.

Noise Level

When Kick in HS-28a produce humming sound as loud as my household fridge. While, CL-650 is much more louder than the fridge. Although both produce bearable noise, comparatively CL-650 produce louder noise than HS-28A. Here's the video to compare the noise level of both chiller

Summary
In term of appreance, the Hailea HS-28a is trendier than the Resun CL-650. In term of noise level, Hailea HS-28a has noticeable advantage as well. So, it's the Hailea HS-28a that going to chill my 2 feet tank