things had died while I was gone

After I got back from my vacation, I saw that my CFL had broken while I was gone. Could've been because of some water that got in the hood, or because the lamp was kinda squashed between the glass and the plastic of the hood. Who knows. Either way, I wasn't going to risk buying another €18 lamp just to have it break again.

On top of that, some of my plants had started rotting and died while I was gone. Most of the salvina natans was falling apart, and the bacopa lanigera was gone altogether. The water was brown, and very hot. I bought a thermometer, and apparently the thermostat didn't work correctly. It should have kept the temperature around 25°C, but instead it was about 30°C in there. I solved this problem by turning the thermostat down a bit. It does keep the temperature constant, but always warmer than it's supposed to be.

Without a lamp, I wouldn't be able to keep any plants, and I saw no way that I could keep a decent lamp in this hood. I went to the aquarium store to see if they had any solutions for me. They had 18W clip-on lights but they were €40, more than I had paid for my aquarium originally. It just seemed too much money to spend. After all this, I didn't feel like carrying on with the aquarium.

Luckily, my boyfriend convinced me to just buy that clip-on light, because I had been wanting an aquarium for so long. So I bought it, and after removing the hood and spending quite some time cutting through the plastic on my aquarium with a butter knife, I was able to attach it to the glass. I also had some glass cut to act as a cover for my aquarium.

 

I removed all the water from my aquarium twice, because it was really a rotten mess. Most of the plants survived though, and all seems well for now.

I was in africa

leopard

elephant

hippo

Kruger sunrise

birth of an aquarium

A few months ago, I decided to get an aquarium on my dorm room. So I purchased one on a second hand site, only to find out later that it had an incandescent light bulb instead of TL lighting which is usually used for aquariums.

But that wasn't something that couldn't be overcome. I would just go buy a CFL with 6500K light (you need that kind of light to be able to grow plants in an aquarium) and small enough to fit in the hood. Only I couldn't find a CFL like that anywhere, not in any of the 4 DIY stores that I visited. Luckily, I found one eventually, but it was very expensive and needed an E27 socket. The socket in my aquarium was an E14, much smaller than the E27. There are adapters that can convert an E14 socket to an E27, but they weren't available in any local store. My only option was ordering one online in China; it didn't cost me much, but...the first one they shipped me got broken, the next one got lost during shipping, so I only got a working one after 1.5 month.

Finally, I was able to put the lamp in the hood. I decided to put in some plants right away:

-salvina natans, a floating plant that I got from my pond

-hygrophila guanensis, which I planted in the left background

-bacopa lanigera, which you can see on the right of the aquarium

-microsorium pteropus or java fern, which I tied to the driftwood

-java moss, which I also tied to driftwood

-Ophiopogon japonicus, better known as mondo grass

After buying the plants, I looked them up and found out that the mondo grass isn't a real aquarium plant, it's actually a garden plant and will die and rot after being submerged for a few months. I decided to keep most of it as a house plant, and put a bit in my aquarium to see how it

Because I was going on a vacation, I decided to just leave the aquarium on my dorm to cycle until I was back.