** ALL MY AQUARIUMS ** FULL MAINTENANCE SESSION AND UPDATES (4K)

No one likes a drama. Actually they do, don't they? People do love a drama. There's no need, no need for drama. There's enough drama going on around the world. I think we should just focus on what we can control. Things like our aquascapes. Hi everyone, in this video I'm going to maintain all of my running aquascapes and give you a general update on them and just a general kind of chit-chat whilst I'm maintaining them. It's one of those videos that you might want to put on in the background whilst you're doing your own tanks maybe, who knows. We do still need to obviously scape this. This is going to be a full Dutch aquascape and a complete series dedicated to that. That will be coming very soon and also I have some very exciting news to share at the end of this video so try to watch all the way through to the end if you can. So first thing, we'll get all the equipment out. I've already got my hoses. So this is the refill hose, still some water in there, which goes straight to my tap in my kitchen, faucet if you're American. And then at the end of that hose we have our special refill device here. So the water comes out of here and then gets diverted upwards and that saves the water from disturbing the soil. I used to use a red colander but I don't really like it anymore so I don't use that. Then we have our siphoning hose. So this is a larger diameter hose for quick siphoning, 16 millimetre internal diameter, and that siphons water directly from the aquarium into my garden. And I also fill up my watering cans so I can water my houseplants. They seem to really love that nutrient laden water. So that's the two main hoses and then we have our kit in here, a spray bottle to stop the plants from drying out, loads of towels. I've already spilt some water already so that's a good shout. A couple of buckets, one has got some equipment in and the other one is for plant cuttings and other debris. And that is about it. Let's get all the towels out shall we? You never know. And then a window cleaner for cleaning the glass. I'll just override the timer there so the lights will stay on. And we will start, I think we'll start by maintaining the scope of line 60. There's a few changes and a few exciting things to talk about in there. So some of you may notice that the background's changed on here. I've removed the orange, which was a very distinct autumn vibe. And I've opted for this sort of transition from yellow green to sort of like an aqua blue green, which actually blends nicely, kind of matches the wallpaper behind. And it also matches one of the pillows, or the cushions I should say, for my comfortable seating. And yeah, I just think it's really cool that we can match the scape to our interior design. So I've just cleaned the glass first. The water's evaporated quite considerably, otherwise I would normally siphon some of that out. And this is the Dennerle Cleanator, which is great for removing stubborn algae very quickly, large surfaces. And then for further to reach down areas I use the scraper. And yeah, big fan of the Dennerle Cleanators. They do have a lifespan. The metal filings kind of come detached after a while. They're completely non-toxic though. So it doesn't matter if they get into your aquarium. Could actually add a little bit of iron content to the water, I guess. I do have hard water here, so every time the water evaporates, it does leave behind an ugly kind of scum mark, which is annoying. But that's one of the disadvantages to having hard water. And we are tempted to start using rainwater to dilute it, to make it a little bit softer, which would arguably improve plant growth. Because apparently, and I'm not sure of the science of this, maybe someone can explain in the comments, the softer your water, the more kind of accessible the nutrients and the CO2 is. So like I say, I don't understand the science fully. I just have read lots of anecdotes on the internet. So if someone does actually understand the full science behind that, and I'm sure one of you does, curious to know, please do drop me a comment and explanation. I do read all the comments. So there is two filters running on here at the moment, two Biomaster. There's a Biomaster 350 and a 250, and they're both running concurrently because I want to keep one mature for the Dutch aquascape when I eventually get around to doing that. It's taken a bit longer than I was hoping. I've been so busy with Tropica. We had the Tropica open day last week, which was a great success. I had a couple of hundred people visit. I did three workshops with Samuele, Samuele, Samuella, Sammy, I call him, Italian proscaper, very, very talented scaper. And it was a great honour and privilege to work with him. He did the hard work, I should say, of creating the scapes mainly. And then I was busy engaging with the audience and preparing plants and, you know, just consulting with him during the process. It was a great team effort. And also shout out to Gio Franco, his Italian friend and Tropica dealer. And we have a escaping stem plant here. So I did trim the Linda filler right back and replant the healthiest portions recently. It was becoming very overgrown and that has allowed some extra access of light for the beautiful Cryptocoryne spiralis red. So that will get more intense colour. Oh, there's another floating stem. I'll replant those in a minute. So that's the glass nearly clean. Now what I'll do is I'll use a scraper to get to the bottom areas of the tank. Now top tip, I've created my own little protector for the razor blade because it is very sharp and it does snap off quite easily. And I have actually cut myself on this before. So I've just cut a piece of hose there and I just wrap that around to save cutting myself or breaking the blade. So now just go down to the bottom area. There's actually a little bit of cyanobacteria building up between the glass and the sand. This is really interesting observation. Cyanobacteria almost always starts off in the substrate. And if the conditions allow, it will get into the main water column and spread over your plants if you're not careful. So it is a good idea to agitate that to stop it from spreading ideally. And to do that we can use a credit card or a hotel room key card. I don't know if I have one to hand right now. Or you can just use a toothbrush. Being careful not to scratch the glass hopefully. But if you just do that it will agitate the cyanobacteria and prevent it from hopefully spreading. Normally caused by excess ambient light hitting the glass. Which is a surprise actually because there's actually very little light, natural light, that comes through this area of my house. We do have some little bits of soil that have migrated forward and some bits of gravel that I'll probably siphon away as well. And then another important job if you want to keep your glass scrupulous is to just keep those corners nice and clean with a toothbrush. This is excellent silicon work on the Oasiscape line. It's very minimal but it's still prone to this kind of chronic algae build-up. So every week I try to, every time I maintain the tank, it hasn't been maintained in a good couple of weeks actually, I try to give it a good clean to stop that from building up too much. Quite a stubborn bit down there actually. So that's that bit done, let's just carry on on the sides. It's all about attention to detail with aquascaping in my mind if you want to have something that's beautiful to look at. You don't want to be distracted by any algae, unnecessary algae. Some algae is inevitable, that's okay, it's part of the natural system. What do you think to the background? Do you prefer the orange or the blue, green, yellow? My wife prefers this one, she didn't really like the orange, which is a surprise because she loves autumn. But anyway, there's no accounting for taste as they say. So I would normally clean the hoses and the lily pipes but I am on a bit of a tight schedule today so I will just remove these snails and plant material from the inlets, that's going to help improve flow and circulation. And then we can do a water change, what I'll do is I'll siphon out the excess bits of soil and stuff from the foreground. I've got a special hose for that. And then we'll do our water change which is very simple, using the the hoses that I showed you earlier. Okay, just be careful not to siphon shrimp, we do have loads of sherry shrimps in here at the moment. Okay, that's nearly the 50% removed already so we probably won't need to use a long hose to siphon out the water. But what I will do now, I hope that water splashing isn't too noisy for you, in fact I'll tell you what, we'll turn the filters off temporarily. So what I will do now is plant those stems. So the potential issue here is that there's no roots to really anchor, there's a little root there that's developed already, it's no surprise that the stem is going to kind of come out quite easily without too much trouble. So let's just try to poke that in as much as I can, and then the same with this one. Put this one towards the back actually. Now we do have some build-up of BBA, black beard or black brush algae on the wood and on the stones, so I will will actually remove some of that with my ADA brush. This is an amazing brush, I've talked about this in previous videos, it's great for removing stubborn algae. Now the issue now is that this BBA is going to float around the water and potentially lodge itself elsewhere, so it's really important to follow up very quickly with a water change straight afterwards. You can see the Semibuca phalangea has not really attached itself properly. I did actually give a lot of the plants away from here to the client for the workshop for them to use in their little cube aquascapes. So quite a lot of build-up here as well. I don't mind a little bit of BBA, as long as you can't really see it from a distance, I think that's the key. Now I do wonder if using rainwater and diluting my hard tap water, probably 50-50 with rainwater, will help. I have heard from a few people that using RO when they made the switch to RO water they didn't suffer from any BBA, so it'll be an interesting observation to experience. That's what I love about this hobby, you can just try little things out, you know, observe, test and adjust. There's also some leaves with some BBA on as well. I'll leave them be for now. Okay, what I'll do is I'll siphon out the rest to 50% and then we can refill with fresh water. And that's that tank maintained, pretty straightforward really. So hook our outlet from the kitchen tap on the end there, ready to turn on. I've got my Oase water conditioner here, it's going to dechlorinate and it's also got lots of other stuff like vitamin B and other things that apparently help the livestock, so that's exciting. So I'll go and turn the tap on now, it's already set to the right temperature, and then I just add a little bit of dechlorinator. I don't actually have much chlorine in my tap water here at home, so I'll just do a capful there, make it nice and safe, and then just make sure that the water that's coming out is roughly the same temperature as the aquarium water, so the fish and the shrimp aren't shocked. If it's a little bit different, it's not too much of a problem, but any massive changes in temperature can potentially cause issues. So now we'll just wait for that to fill up, I'll turn the filters back on now actually. I would normally clean the Biomaster pre-filters as well, but because there's relatively low stock and there's two big filters running on a small tank, it isn't necessary. Plenty of circulation, so the pre-filters aren't obviously blocked, so I can probably leave that another week or so. There is a lot of floating plant matter from the Limnophila, so we'll net that out. Slide the light back, keep an eye on the water, it will overflow and flood the living room otherwise. I normally fill up to about one centimetre, just over a quarter of an inch from the rim. Okay, almost there. Let's check the temperature again, that's fine. It's a little bit cooler, but that's okay. Now I'll go and get ready to turn the tap off. Okay, almost done, let's just take that out. It will drip, so make sure you've got towels. I'll be using these tools in the big tank to my left, so I'll just pop them in there for now. Let's just net out the rest of the bits and bobs. I actually really enjoy maintenance, I am kind of rushing it a bit today. Ideally I would just take my time and enjoy the process. I think it's worth dedicating non-negotiable time to maintain your tanks if you can. It's part of the hobby, and a hobby is there for you. It's a pastime that should be enjoyed and not be stressful, so by default, ideally, you don't want to be rushing these things. Even something as simple as netting out leaves is an opportunity to be mindful. Just take your time and enjoy it, you know, think about what you're doing, removing the dying plant matter from the aquarium, which in turn is going to help keep it healthy. Prevent any excess nasty organics from maybe triggering an algae or affecting the water quality. So there we are, that is the tank maintained almost. Last thing is just to give it a wipe down, slide that forward for better exposure. There we go, I do normally have that slid all the way to the back to encourage the red plant growth of the Limnophila and the Crypt. There will be some little bits of floating bits around, but they will get trapped with the filter inlets there. And last but not least, add our liquid fertilizer. In this tank, I am using the daily fertilizer from Oase, so I just do a cap of that, and then also the mineral, which is just a different nutrient profile, a cap of that as well. And it's just a beautiful system, you know, the tank, the cabinet, the filtration, the Biomaster, the scaper soil from Oase, the Oase liquid fertilizer, the Oase fish food, it's just a proven performer as you can see. This was originally scaped as part of a workshop about three, four months ago now, and it's a real joy to see it mature so beautifully. Okay, now it's time to move on to the URSA Highline 400, my biggest and best aquascape. Okay, start to maintain the Highline 400. Remove the lid, this is an aluminium lid, which is very easy to remove. It also conducts a lot of the heat away from the tank to avoid overheating, which is handy. Pop that there for now. First job is clean the glass. I even love this part of the process. I love getting my hands in the tank. It's important to make sure your hands are clean or they haven't been used, you know, previously with any nasty chemicals. And so, you know, if you've been in the garden, you've been using any kind of pesticides or herbicides or anything like that, do wash your hands thoroughly because even like, even a part, parts per billion, it will affect the shrimp, snails, if you like to keep snails, you know, they're super sensitive to these pesticides, etc. All the way across. This is nearly a five foot long tank, just under five foot long. They do a bigger version now, the Highline 600, which I think is more like six foot long. It's tempting to upgrade it, but I don't want to give in to that hedonistic treadmill. I don't know if you've heard of that. You basically get whatever you have, whatever kind of level of perceived luxury or comfort you get, you get used to it really quickly. So in my mind, just better to be content, if you can, with what you have rather than constantly striving for the next biggest thing, the next best thing. There's nothing wrong with wanting to, you know, improve your equipment or even improve your skills. Definitely a growth mindset, but that's the mind, you know, it's about growing your skills and experience and not necessarily growing a materialistic, you know, value in terms of having a bigger and better, perceived better. What is better, you know, sometimes less is more. That's why it's, you know, tempting to go for this crushed snail. The fish will love to eat that. It's better to kind of be content with, if you can, content with what you've got. Optimise what you have already rather than striving for something necessarily that you think will improve your life just because it's more expensive or more valuable in terms of cost, financial cost. You think about, you know, the 600 will be a lovely tank, of course. It does have low iron glass, which is an improvement of this. This is the regular float glass. So who knows, I might, I might upgrade it and then give this away to a suitable cause, like a school or someone that doesn't necessarily can't afford a beautiful aquarium like this. So I'll just carry on cleaning the glass. You don't need to see that. And then the next scene will be, well, you'll see it in a second. Okay, next job is to thin out the crips and the swords. Full of water still from the Scapeline 60. So first thing I do is just look for any leaves that aren't perfect or any damaged leaves, basically. So I have noticed that the Amano shrimp tend to nibble on the leaves. I think they get a bit hungry without any algae in there. And the fish are obviously eating all the fish food, so they don't even get any left over fish food. So they resort to eating what they can, which is plant matter. They also eat the wood. Wood is actually becoming slowly more thin. It's reducing in its volume. So I think it's only a matter of time before the wood kind of disappears, really. The scape has been running for its current form. Oh, there's a door. Yeah, so basically I'm removing any non-optimum plants and also crushing any excess snails. Snails are okay, but you know, if population gets too big, they just look a bit unsightly. You can see the crips are getting massive, almost reaching the surface now. I'm wondering when the time will come eventually, where it's kind of diminishing returns, I think the phrase is, where it's taking more time and energy to keep it looking good than it would do to create something new. I mean, yeah, it's always a bit of a, it's always a bit of a battle as a creator, but you know, the new, creating something new, which is great for the view, you know, great for the new audiences. They want to see new creations. It's understandable, something novel. There's not much novelty in seeing the same scape, just sort of maturing a little bit. Although I'd argue that something quite rewarding in seeing a scape in the very long term is, I think there's a bit of a misconception that when you have a high tech scape, it's a limited lifespan because of the fast growth, et cetera. But I think if you use the appropriate plants and aquascape design, you can keep these going indefinitely, which is, you know, three years is, I think, a good run for a high tech aquascape. Whether we are using easy plants, relatively slow growing, let's say slow growing, I take out at least 50 leaves probably every maintenance session. There's an art to maintaining a tank because it is part of the, it is part of the process. It's part of the creation. And what you're trying to do is just optimize for the whole health of the system, but also optimize for the aesthetics. So it's easy to let plants just grow and grow out of control. And there's a, there's a joy in that kind of chaotic look, but there's a balance to be had. When they get too out of control, they start to smother each other. Some of the plants will suffer because they haven't got access to light and circulation and CO2, et cetera. So it's about balancing the aesthetics, balancing the functionality and enjoying the whole process at the same time. And that's certainly something that I'm doing with this aquascape over the last three years. Probably get away with not cleaning the pre-filters on this today. I definitely need to clean the pre-filters on the cyclotank because I've noticed a reduction in the flow rate. So I do have to clean those at least every two weeks, ideally every week. And the Biomaster pre-filters are so easy to maintain, of course. Also bear in mind that there is a new Biomaster coming out soon with improved features. So there will be a full video unboxing, et cetera, on that coming soon. That's the good thing about it, they do listen to the feedback and make improvements on the design as appropriate. So just looking at the Amazon sword leaves now, this is Echinodorus Red Diamond. I did have Holmwinei Red and Flame as well, and I'm not sure which is which to be honest. And the Crypt, someone asked me what the Crypt IDs are. It's really hard to say. A lot of the tall ones are actually Undulatus Red or Undulatus Broadleaf. They are growing like mad, as you can see. I love the brown leaves. I know it's not very popular to like brown colours, but something very understated and beautiful, I think, in brown. So we just keep repeating that process. So just observing, scanning, observing each plant, any leaves that don't look so good. And it becomes a bit of a, as a beginner, it's hard to differentiate sometimes between what is really healthy and what isn't. And this is why just experience, you can't teach experience. It's just literally time in front of your tank, time observing the plants, pattern recognition. I think this is why maybe some of the really skilled aquascapers are probably on the autism spectrum, because pattern recognition is a skill that we have. Speaking of autism, I will be visiting, revisiting the special school, the Fitzroy Academy in Shropshire, and meeting up with my friend Myles, who's a teacher at the school. He's such a cool guy. He's actually the one that really motivated me to try a Dutch aquascape again. So I know Myles will be watching this at some point. So shout out to Myles, really, really good guy, and very grateful for his friendship. Nearly there, I think. And then after this, just the water change, really. Not much to do. This is the great thing about this scape. It's so large, it's so stable, almost runs on autopilot. You know, when I go away for my trips abroad, I leave the aquariums for a week at a time. My youngest stepson or my wife, all they have to do is feed the fish, feed the liquid fertilizer. Just keep a general eye on things. And when I return, there's normally not much drama, which is, you know, no one likes to come home to a drama-filled aquarium, do they? Unless you love a drama. Hobby's not about drama, is it? It's about peace, I think. Peace and connection. Connection with nature, connection with something bigger than yourself. It reminds me that we're all in it together, you know, this life, and that everything in here is reliant on just, you know, obviously natural processes, but also the guiding hand of the creator and the maintainer. And it's a responsibility, I don't think, that should be taken lightly. And the more effort and energy you kind of put in, generally speaking, in the right way, the more reward you get back. You know, you can see the healthy plant growth, the gradual maturation of the scape, the fish growing old, eventually the fish passing, because you've outgrown them in their lifespan. I'm getting that now with the cichlids, probably some of them are six years old. Some of these fish will probably be nearly that now. The Amano shrimp have been in here since day one, so they're at least, when I got them, they were fairly mature specimens, so they're going to be at least six years old. And something, something more deeply connecting when you're looking after something for years at a time. Okay, I think we're there for the plant removal. Next step is the water change. And whilst I'm doing the water change, I will clean the pre-filters. I said I wouldn't do, but I think I will, because I've got time whilst the water's changing almost itself. Okay, so we have our siphon hose that goes into my back garden there, and we've got our fresh water there. I will siphon out now. And then top tip while that's siphoning, what I like to do is actually just sort of wave your hands over the plants, don't be afraid to touch them. It's going to dislodge any built-up detritus, any waste organics. We do have good circulation in here so there shouldn't be too much build-up of stuff, but you never know. And then that is just going to be, there's quite a lot there, hopefully removed as part of the water change. I don't know if you can see in the video, but there's a lot of detritus build up, builds up around the wood. What I think that is, is actually shrimp. The shrimp are literally eating the wood and then pulling out the wood, because there's not much nutrients in wood, I don't think. So I'm guessing the wood serves as a kind of minor nutrient source. And then any nutrient, any kind of, once the wood's been digested, it gets excreted, and then that is what we see building up around here. It's all part of the ecosystem, it's all part of the process. So whilst that's siphoning now, I'll just let the water kind of clear a little bit with the filters, get rid of that leaf there, and then I'll turn the filters off to clean the pre-filters. I've done loads of videos on cleaning the pre-filters so we don't need to talk about that in too much detail. It'll be time to refill with our fresh, dechlorinated tap water, and then it'll be time to maintain the cichlid tank. Congratulations if you've made it this far! What I will do is just put the lid on temporarily. We do have hatchet fish in here, and flying foxes, which are notorious for jumping. It'll also help to prevent and limit the drying out of the plants as well. I do have a separate spray bottle for that somewhere, here we are. Once the plants, these are all fully adapted of course to ground water, and what happens is if those plants dry out, it will damage the plant tissue, and we don't want that. A damaged plant is a doorway for algae, and we don't want algae, especially if it can be prevented relatively easily. So now I will clean the pre-filters. This is the Biomaster 850, this is the first Biomaster 850 ever to reach the UK, and hopefully I'll get the first Biomaster 2 soon as well, which would be quite a nice kind of story. I love the filters, I actually bought my first Biomaster, loved it so much that it started my relationship with the Wase, so grateful for that. Okay, just take this to the sink, clean them, won't take long. So what can happen now is when I turn the filters on, we can get a load of gunk come out of the filters, so we'll see. But it'll clear relatively soon because they're such powerful filters, and we've got good circulation in there. Okay, time for a bit of dechlorinator. Perfect temperature, that's good, so I'll just leave that to fill up now. It is a bit cloudy from the filters, but that'll clear up. Okay, so that's the tank fully filled up now, you can see it's still a little bit cloudy, that will be little remnants from the filter as they started up. That'll clear by the time we finish maintaining the Cichlid tank. Let's go over and do that now. Okay, last but not least, the Cichlid tank. There was a Highline 300 room divider, no longer available in the UK, unfortunately, but is available in Europe. And yeah, it's a beautiful tank, I love it. It's low iron glass, I love the way it divides the room. There's almost three individual scapes, you can see one from this side, this side, and this side. Plenty of videos already on this, the setup as well. I gave some of the fish away, there's a whole video about that. But yeah, we'll just do a basic maintenance on it, really, really straightforward. Basically, remove the lid, clean the glass, clean the filters, change the water, and that is it. The Anubias is so slow growing, it requires very little maintenance. And to clean the glass, the old algae magnet, and it's very surprising that there's not much more algae that builds up on this. It gets a lot of natural light from my skylights up there, but I honestly believe the Anubias is a real good water quality kind of maintenance process. It isn't growing very quickly, but I think it is removing a lot of nitrates, because I did a video of testing the water on here, and the nitrates were higher in my tap water than they were in here. So it just shows you that the plants are definitely soaking up something, obviously nitrates apparently. And that's really interesting, the root network now of the Anubias is very mature. I have removed a couple of the plants over the months, and it's actually quite astonishing how complex and dense those roots are. And I believe, you know, those roots are actually really beneficial, and they're obviously in the water column, and I think they're extracting a lot of the nitrogen from the water, which is maintaining good quality water, and the fish are very healthy. The flow is restricted a little bit now, I think it's been about two, three weeks since I last cleaned the pre-filter, so it's no surprise. I do have two Oase Biomaster 850s on here, which is a lot of filtration, but as you can see they are big fish. They're not so active now, and I do believe that is because of the restriction in flow a little bit. So I'll just clean the last bit of the algae from the bottom of the glass. Yeah, like I say, it's surprising the algae doesn't build up so much in here. Now what I do do is give the substrate and the plants a really good kind of wave around whilst it's siphoning. So we'll just start the siphon here into the garden, put that there, and then you'll see probably a load of the waste organics, the detritus, get kicked up into the water column, and then the powerful filters will will suck it up, as well as the siphon obviously, getting rid of a load of it. So the sicklies love to dig the gravel and the sand, so I often kind of just move it back a little bit, play around with it. It's just such an easy tank to maintain, and it's just such a lovely feature for the home. You know, I'll often just sit behind the camera and just stare at the fish. They're so active, they're so fun, their behaviour's really interesting, and yeah, it's just been a joy to live with. It was originally scaped in a Highline 175, so about half the volume of this, and I had originally 10 juvenile sicklids. These are Chinnungo saluzzi. For those that aren't aware, the females are yellow and the males are blue. They all start off yellow, and then as they mature they'll show their sex with a different colour, and depending on their kind of hierarchy, their level in the packing order, if you like, in the aquarium, depends on how much colour they show. So the sort of the darker blue, more vivid blues, will be the more dominant species, and then you can actually get a very dominant female, which will almost start to kind of look a little bit blue, almost like a cross between the blue and the yellow, and then vice versa with a subordinate male, that will be a paler, maybe even a little bit yellow as well. Now we do have some Sinodontis persicola, I think they're called. This keeps coming detached, this bit of Anubias here. This is Anubias petite. Let's see if I can wedge it down here. Sometimes the plants just do get knocked around by the sicklids, they are quite brutal, but once the plants have attached, you know that they're going to stay there, so it's just a question of trial and error, and eventually... Hello, you all right? You're being a funny sausage, aren't you? You want to play, don't you? Where's the banana? Go and get it. Good boy, there it is. So you can see a load of the detritus sort of being lifted up, and then do the same on the other side. There is a couple of Bristlenose catfish in here, I think they're both female, because they're staying relatively small and they don't have the sort of the horns, whatever they're called, the whiskers, that come out of the top of their head, I think. So yeah, they're not breeding of course, which is okay, the sicklids are breeding. But I don't know if I think it's kind of okay, the stocking level now, I mean it's certainly okay in terms of the nitrogen production, as I say the plants I think are removing enough of it, and there's probably denitrification occurring within the stones maybe, within the rocks and the substrate, so yeah, who knows? All I know is I love it and it seems to be working as a system quite well. There is some kind of nutrient deficiencies on the uppermost Anubias, it kind of makes sense because that'll be, it's nearest the light, so it'll be the most sort of fast growing, and it is almost yellow, so and there is a little bit of green spot algae, so I will actually, I think I will actually start dosing some liquid fertilizer in here again. I'll use stuff I think, yeah, I'll do that at the end of the water change. So we'll go quite far down with the water and then as before with the Highline 400, I'll clean the filters as it's going through that water change process. Good boy Tommy! So yeah, just an easy tank to maintain as you can see, it is a real game changer using the hose into the garden. If you have anything, you know, larger than sort of 100 litres or 30 gallons or so, it's probably worth doing the same if you can, having some sort of method to make the water change process easy. Yeah, you want to kind of, with aquarium maintenance, it's a good idea to kind of make some of the process as efficient as you can. Before now, I would, a few years ago, I would have literally just been siphoning into a, you know, three gallon or 10 litre bucket and going to and from the kitchen sink and dechlorinating every bucket, pouring it in, you know, so this is very labour-saving and you can spend more time doing other maintenance practices during this process, so it does make it a lot more efficient. Although maintenance doesn't have to be like super optimised, again there's something like lovelier just about connecting with your tank, spending time with it, you know, there's, it's quite an interesting topic, there's so much automation now in the hobby, smart plugs and apps and things like this, I think sometimes it's nice to go back to basics, you know, I've been considering lighting options for my aquariums because I'd like to keep them all the same, this is an Oase classic LED, which is fine, but it'd be nice to have something a bit more full spectrum to bring out the colours better maybe, and then the other tanks have got different types of lighting on, so I'd like to keep it all coherent, so it was sort of going between Twinstar and Shihiros, and actually I've plenty of experience with them both, but I've gone for Twinstar actually, and there should be some new units on their way, and the reason for that is I like the idea of just having a fixed spectrum, and it's quite controversial, a lot of people, a lot of hobbyists like the controllability, it's quite a novel feature, you can mess around and stuff, but I think there's an inherent potential issue with that, especially with newcomers, beginners that aren't necessarily so experienced growing plants, that it becomes too controllable, and therefore the room for error is bigger, because it's quite, I guess it's tempting, especially with a new unit, that you want to kind of mess around with the spectrums and things like this, and that could, when a plant adapts to a certain spectrum, it likes that spectrum, and if you keep changing it, it's probably not going to adapt and potentially optimize your plant growth, so I think there's something to be said for sticking with a good spectrum, you know ADA, they don't have any controllability of their spectrum, and they're arguably the flagship aquarium brand when it comes to some of their products, certainly one of the most expensive, so yeah, interested to know your thoughts, do you like the controllability, or is it a gimmick that isn't necessary and could potentially cause issues? What I do like is having a controllability of power, you know, intensity, at least having some sort of, like a nice ramping up and ramping down, and having the ability to have, you know, different settings, even if it's just like the Twinstar 120Gs, I think there's only five different intensities, I think that's fine, I think five or six, however there are, is fine, very simple device to control the photo period and the intensity, and I think that's all you need, so yeah, that's a little bit of a ramble about lighting, let me know what your thoughts are. Okay we're nearly at 50%, I'm going to turn the filters off and ready to clean those. Okie dokie, let's put the filters back, there you go, it'll be a bit cloudy, just like the other tank, but it'll clear up soon enough. My wife and I have got one of these each, she's got the light one which is easy, I've got to have more of a thingy, either one, and then because she sits at her desk all day, pretty much every day, I get her to get up and do some exercises, because it's not about lifespan, oh no, it's not about lifespan, it's about healthspan, so no point in living to an old age if you're not like fit and mobile, in my opinion, so I'm a bit obsessed about exercise and nutrition, which is the worst things to be obsessed about isn't it, like well aquascaping, that's a good thing to be obsessed about I think, it's a very healthy hobby. I've got into houseplants lately, check out these bad boys over here, Emma came up with the genius idea of putting an old ladder up here to use as a place where we can hang our plants and get the plants to grow, I'm just so grateful that she's embraced the aquariums and living amongst nature, living with nature rather than against it, rather than trying to control it, you know, there's this human tendency I think, based on ego, to want to control everything, and I guess in a way we are controlling our environment in our homes by using the plants, but the control is based on feeling connected to the nature I think, that's how I feel and that's how I see it. Thanks for staying to the end, hopefully, fingers crossed, I will be doing the collaboration with good old MD Fish Tanks, it would be the third video we've done together, but he's grown considerably since the last one we did. It's exciting to see a studio, I think the plan is that we're going to do a scape together, my intention would be to do a classic, in fact I'm going to look through my old Amano books and between us hopefully we can recreate a classic Amano scape, so that will be really exciting. Thanks for watching, really appreciate you, appreciate your attention, appreciate your interest in aquascaping, appreciate you watching to the end, let me know in the comments if you watched to the end, I do read all the comments and I'm very grateful for you. Take care, see you on the next one, cheerio!