fluxtor wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2024 15:38 pm
How long would you expect before a tank becomes fully mature? I guess that's very tank specific and difficult to answer!
Some say aquariums can take as little as three months, personally I think twelve months, some may disagree but there are a lot of factors involved. My 310 litre took around eighteen if I'm honest.
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fluxtor wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2024 15:38 pm
Yeah I realize the sky-lite is going to be an issue and to be honest if I get my way the tank won't be staying there for ever. If my plan comes to fruition and I get my nice big tank in the front room (somewhere around 1200 x 550 x 600 approx 300 liters) it will definitely be gone. I guess for now I'll just keep battling and keeping up with my weekly maintenance and hope it finds a balance. I may change up the planting a bit but we'll see.
To be honest nobody is home most of the day so could just shorten the photo period even more and maybe find a way to dim the lights a tad!
My Fluval Aquasky lights are only at their brightest for two hours per day and is the only piece of useful technology on my aquarium, a photoperiod control app.
If you know the aquarium getting light from that skylight at a certain time of day, I'd reduce the photoperiod accordingly.
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For example, if you care to look at the image above, you'll see a large south facing window, one of two windows in this room. In winter, because the Wisteria is not in leaf, the sunlight is particularly strong through these windows. The sun is low currently, so as the sun travels from east to west, the aquarium quite a lot of the time the tank gets extra 4 to 6 hours of sunlight, particularly from 10:00 am. Normally, my lights are on 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the evening but at the moment the morning schedule is switched off to compensate for the extra light. When I shot this picture the sun is near enough out of sight of the aquarium and in around an hour the evening light photoperiod will start.
However, I could just close the blinds, curtains and use the lights instead but where's the fun in that ...it's using energy unnecessarily which makes the fat cats at EDF happy and my poor wallet very unhappy.