Amazing Diy Aquascape with Discus Planted Tank Aquarium For Betta Fish No Co2

What's in here? There's more to see. Come on in here, George. Where are we right now? It's an amazing aquarium. Some of the craziest stuff. You're going to see some really exotic freshwater, saltwater aquariums. And this is not open to the public. No, of course not. No. It keeps going on. What's up, guys? My name's George, and today we're here at what I would consider the best hidden little aquarium store. We're in the town of Elgin, Illinois, which is about 35 miles northwest of Chicago. In this very unsuspecting location, it's essentially just like a bunch of warehouses here. You're going to be surprised to find this little spot. This place is called the SR Aquaristic Aqua Lounge, and it's home to some of the most amazing freshwater aquascapes, and even some pretty amazing saltwater reef tanks as well. We're about to go inside and meet the owner, Scott, and he's going to give us a private tour. Welcome to the Aqua Lounge. This is Scott, industry expert, aquascaper, manufacturer, aquarium nerd. Aquarium nerd. So we're at the SR Aquaristic Aqua Lounge, as you said. This space we created for people to come relax, hang out, get inspired, and then local clubs meet here. What is SR Aquaristic? The reason why we came up with the name SR Aquaristic is because many years ago, a pretty spectacular man gave me my first start in the aquarium industry, and that was Rolf C. Hagen. And I don't think he really knew what to do with me. So when I started, he said, we will call you the aquaristic product manager. That's where the name came from. So aquaristic in Germany means everything to do with aquariums. I always wanted to do my own thing. I always wanted to have my own company. And so about four years ago, I left my former company to start this. Here's where we are today. This is a GFRC table, which is glass fiber reinforced concrete. You'll notice a lot of our stuff, we use that material. It's super durable. I mean, you can spill on it. You could soak it underwater if you wanted. It was originally used for outdoor use. And this was a collaboration between Zero Edge Aquarium and SR Aquaristic for the Chicago Flower and Garden Show. So we had this featured in the aquascape booth. I can't tell if this is the most epic thing ever or the most impractical thing. It's both. It's an amazing aquarium. I can't see anyone really sitting and having dinner at this. It's more of a showpiece in their house. It's just a beautiful piece. We can grow plants in it. We can keep fish in it. Can you imagine what my parents would say if I replaced our kitchen table with this? It would be worth seeing your dad react for sure. What are these? These are some really cool concept aquariums. What we wanted to do is create a very simplistic stand. As you can see, there's no doors on the front. So it's almost like a pedestal that you would see in an art gallery. And we use these to showcase our 30 centimeter rimless aquariums. This is a 30 centimeter by 10 by 30. This allows us to do scapes that are below and above the water. All right, we'll move over to this set of tanks. We call these our tabletop stands. So these aren't actually connected to the aquarium. It's just a stand for it. Correct. This is a scape using some terrestrial plants. There's a little waterfall in the back. And then, yeah, guppies. So you make the lights as well? Yep. This is our L40 light, which means there's 40 LEDs. And it's a fairly inexpensive, not too bright light that we use for low light plants like crypts or anubias. What are all these? Wabi Kusa. Where does that name come from? It comes from Japan. Basically, it's a soil ball. And a lot of people, what they'll do is they'll take aquatic plants and then plant them in the soil ball, create a high humidity situation until the plants convert over to a terrestrial. They'll remove the top or just keep a higher humidity and they'll grow in that soil ball. And so that's how it starts. And then once it's ready, you would move it over to like a terrarium? Correct. I mean, you can do all kinds of great things with different types of hardscape, different types of wood. You can put wood or petals on the shelf. I mean, you can make a beautiful display that's inexpensive with this type of soil ball. These tanks right here, they're a little bit different. These look like they're kits of some sort. Yeah, these are our DecoTank aquariums. So it's an all-in-one kit. We also have them where scape material comes with them. So for people who aren't super creative but want a cool scape, we will actually scape it for them and in a complete kit. And these are kind of cool because the tops open up so you can get inside. Low light plants do very well. We also have a couple of marine customers. What's in here? What kind of fish are these? These are antlers and guppies. Why do they look like they're kind of pregnant? Yeah, because they are. Actually, we had the Chicago Live Bearer Association in here. They dropped those off. You can see that they have like a lyre tail on the top. Yeah. This is beautiful. That is a beautiful fish. Yes, it is. And from what I'm told, all of those guppies that are in the market today came from one original pair. So tell us about these. You created these. As you mentioned, these are Illuminariums. We have two different versions. We have one, which is terrarium, which is actually easier to keep. And then an aquarium version, which can be a lot of fun and has a lot of options. I was inspired visiting a restaurant overseas. They had thousands of very similar orbs with aquatic plants. And I thought, what a cool way of adding color and some life to any kind of setting. We use these a lot for chandeliers over tables. Even in my office at home, I have six of them beside my desk hanging from the wall. It's like having a little mini aquarium. Moving on. Tell us about this tank. So, yeah, this is our African Cichlid tank. This is using our elephant skin stone. I really love this tank because the fish are always, always breeding. And you can see where they've dug out and created little caves. It's really cool because when you feed, you see fry coming out all the time. So it's always changing this aquarium. This tank is really cool. Neon Tetras, Java Fern, some floaters. And they got, what are these, Cory? Cory cats. Yeah. Yeah. But Lava Rock and some Spiderwood. What is this fish right here? That is a Crabenza. There's a male and a female. They're always breeding in there. This is actually a type of water lettuce, a dwarf water lettuce. And then the dreaded duckweed. Yeah. And then there's some red root floaters. You can see that the roots on them are red. I love discus. So this is going to probably be my favorite tank, at least so far. So these are Melon Discus. There's five in there. So they tend to just kind of hang out in the leaves. We have a ton of Rummy Nose Tetras as well. You can really tell if that fish is happy because if it's not happy, the Rummy Nose is not predominantly as red. And so it's sort of a gauge of your water quality. I love that fish too. And then just some basic crypts. We put them in sort of an order to create zones for the Rummy Nose to school around them. And then we have some Spiderwood in here. This is our Black Spiderwood and Siru Stone. This tank, so much greener. Actually, come over here just slowly. And if you look on top of that log, there's one of our Golden Nugget Black O's. That's a beautiful fish as well. Look at that. Yeah, it's one of my favorite fish. It is just absolutely gorgeous. Why are the plants in this tank looking so much greener than any other? It's just a different type of plants. In here, we're using the Adelite as well. This one I'm running kind of old school. So I'm using a pH controller. I'm using CO2. The fish in here is a Cardinal Tetra. The fish we were looking at before is a Neon Tetra. The difference between a Cardinal and a Neon is on a Cardinal, you have solid blue, solid red. And on a Neon, you have a half red. Another thing you have on a lot of these tanks are the canister filters. All our freshwater tanks, we use a Wasi canister filters. We love them. There's a lot of great canister filters out there, but they're so hard to clean. Well, this one's much easier because basically what you do is you unlock it. I'm doing this on the fly, so it's risky. Pull out this, where all your sponges are. That's what you clean. And then when you're done, you clip it back in, lock it back up, and you're good to go. I need one of these before I leave. So all you do is push down the prime, and then they'll start right up. All right, so moving over here, this is the saltwater tanks. You got two tanks. They both have the cool Aquaristik stands. Is it one of them in here, or is it just splitting? No, they've been splitting like crazy. And we weed them out all the time. And within a few weeks, they're back to the same size. Why haven't I got one? I guess you have to know a guy. I feel let down. People have been offering us crazy amounts of money. Apparently, this is the Chicago. This is the Chicago Sunburst? Yeah. Oh my gosh. I think we can give you one, no problem. This is cool because you got some leathers. And then what is this, like a type of macroalgae down here? Yeah, that's a macroalgae, red macroalgae. What's like your secrets? I love calcium reactors. Like, I'm a calcium reactor guy. I would never run a reef without a calcium reactor. Okay. So talk to me about calcium. Sure. Yeah, so we have the calcium reactor here. Do you make those? Yeah, we make fresh water and salt water support systems. And then we're using our dual stage regulator. You see that little tentacle coming out of the rock? That's a serpent star. Yeah, he's a monster. Do you want me to give him some food? JBL Germany makes this. And so basically you just tear it open and it's an alternative to frozen food. And then you have plankton that will feed the corals and the fish and no frozen food. It's quicker. You know, you don't have to defrost it and it's in individual packets. Okay, look at the starfish. He's coming out. Whoa. He's a monster. As soon as he gets a little taste of that, he's out. Oh, he found it. He's bringing it in. Whoa. See, he's like taking the food and putting it in his mouth. Here's the coral banded shrimp. Look at him. He's really cool. You can see here we got a bangai cardinal fish. Some really cool soft coral right there that looks like a hand. Special clownfish. These are the designer clownfish. Then what is this thing that you're holding? A feeding ring. So a lot of times in marine aquariums where you have lots of flow, the food will spin around and you lose a lot of it on the overflow. So with this, you can just put flake food or frozen food inside and it'll slowly dissipate. The fish start to learn to come and get it and you can adjust the water level as well. Here we hold our water for doing water changes. We hold 400 gallons at a time and we run reverse osmosis deionized water and then we'll remineralize all the water that we use for the planted tanks. Sometimes if we're doing 150 gallons of water changes, I'll put fertilizer in here as well so that I can fertilize all the tanks at one time. Who maintains all the tanks in here? Myself and Rachel. That's a lot of work just in itself. It's a labor of love. I love doing it. I love this hobby. It's amazing. What is this? Greeter systems? So what we do is we just have these where we have some plants and fish that we can pull from for our displays or for photography. When customers come in, we'll give them some plants for their aquarium to get them started and teach them a little bit about plants. So that's always fun. Rasboras? Yep, you got it. Guppies, Grammys, Gladys, Serpe Tetras, all kinds of algae eaters, some rainbow fish, angelfish. Angelfish down here? Yeah, those are all angels from my home tank. I still breed angels. That's kind of how I got started in this hobby. So I'm always breeding angels. I have probably about 400 at home right now. You have 400 angelfish at home? Yeah, and probably maybe 700 or 800 plecos right now. These are our RODI units. You make these as well? Yes, we do. It's a great system, 50 or 100 gallons per day. All of our RODI units come with a booster pump so that we can maximize the output and the efficiency. Right. And then the rest goes into these vats. Moving over here, this is all the merchandise. This is like the supplies, the accessory area. This is where people can come in and literally purchase all of the things that they're seeing in the showroom. Yeah, they can get our product at local retailers. These are your tanks? Yep. I think we have 20 different tanks, low iron, rimless glass aquariums, really nice silicone, beautiful, beautiful tanks. You guys manufacture like so many different things. Yeah, we manufacture quite a bit of different accessories and products. So these are your pumps, your skimmers, dozing containers. We have biopellet reactors, calcium reactors, refractometers. I mean, it's just great because we're all hobbyists that work here. So whenever we're experimenting or playing around with something, it always inspires a new product. We open the lounge. It's not a store, but we open the lounge for people to come in and get inspired. We help them with their scapes here. And yes, we do have products here as well. Gotcha. You got a whole section here just for a hard scape. Oh, this is just a small amount of hard scape. What is this kind of wood? This is actually called gnarly wood. I tend to like the smoother side better than the gnarly side. I'm just going to say gnarly, gnarly wood. Gnarly wood. And then this is our dojo. So what we'll do here is we'll map out the size of the aquarium that the customer has, and then we will help them scape it if they need our help. Or we allow people to come in and pull from our racks and make their own scape. So here's where we keep some of our bigger scape materials. Whoa, these are so cool. This is like bigger than me. How much do these things sell for? That one there, we usually sell for $7.99. Where do these come from? Various places in the world. Most of this stuff is coming out of Asia. Is any of this coming from the United States? No. So if you come here, you can literally pick out all these exotic pieces of wood and hard scape that are coming from? Mostly out of China, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia. You travel a lot to these places and you'll like hand pick some of these yourself. Yeah. Guys, this is an exclusive for the channel. You guys are about to see something crazy. All right, so where are we heading now? Back into the main cavern of our warehouse. The warehouse? Yes. And this is not open to the public? No, of course not. No. Why not? Because it's a warehouse and it's dangerous. So here we actually distribute the products, including Fritz products that we love. This is a whole warehouse full of aquarium supplies, hard scape, woods, rocks. If you're a local aquarium store, you're actually able to come here and buy from the warehouse. The cool thing is we actually allow local stores to come and hand pick their driftwood. We're here to support local retailers as well. There's more wood behind there. You guys thought he had wood before. Look at this. So yeah, we have lots of different types of spiderwood, pine spiderwood, not more gnarly wood, black spiderwood. It keeps going on. The packing area? Yes, they're packing peanuts. Here, want a snack? They're corn-based peanuts. We use them to pack our products because they're environmentally friendly. Try it. Not bad. Are all packing peanuts like this? No, there's two different types. Guys, kids, especially kids, do not eat packing peanuts. What's in here? There's more to see. Come on in here, George. The squeaky door, that's not good. When you hear that sound, guys, run. Run. So this is our WYSIWYG room. So when we see an exceptional piece of hard scape, we'll pull it out and we'll number them and then we'll put them on our website so customers can actually pick the exact piece that they want. Scott, at first, I just thought like you liked wood. Now, I think it might be like a problem. Yeah. We pressure wash and heat treat every single piece of rock, every single piece of wood that we have so that it's super clean. We got this tank right next to the popcorn machine. You absolutely need to have snacks for your customers. Popcorn is almost as big of a problem as driftwood for us. This is really cool. So this is an inspiration from my pond days. You can see there's several waterfalls that we built into this. I sit all of the dragonstone in the areas where I think we'll make a really cool waterfall. Then I use aquascape polyurethane foam to foam everything together. This is my office. So I work a ton of hours. You know that. I work here full time during the day and night. I work another full time doing the same thing. I do it because I love it. I mean, I couldn't imagine myself doing anything else. I couldn't imagine my life without an aquarium. It's just such an important part of my life and it's my form of relaxation. Every aquarium that's set up to me is a piece of art. The thing I love about it most is it's living art and it changes every day. So every day you look at your aquarium, especially if you have live plants and corals, that is a living, breathing piece of nature. And every day there's something interesting. What would you like to accomplish by the time you're done with your career? No, I don't think I'll ever be done with my career because for me, it's a career, but it's also something that I love. I would just like to inspire people to keep planted in reef aquariums. That's all I really want. I'm not in this to get rich. I just want to enjoy the hobby, enjoy the customers that we get to interact with on a daily basis, try and provide something of quality into the industry. And for me, that's plenty. All right, guys, we've come to the end of the tour. Scott, thanks. Thanks, George. Thank you, man. This place is awesome. You're able to come here if you'd like. It is open to the public. You can see the showroom for yourself. We're here again in Elgin, Illinois. I'll leave the link to their website and the directions to this place in the description below. You can come here. You can see it for yourself. I think it's well worth it. You're going to be inspired and you're definitely going to want to make your aquarium better. Remember to keep those nitrates low. George. Out.