New aquarium after a few years lay off!

We decided it was time for a new aquarium after being fish free for a few years!

The last one was 90l and we decided to go for a 240l, I believe that's 63 US gallons for anyone that side of the pond!

We went with a Fluval Roma 240 with LED lighting and external filter.




So I thought, gravel, plants etc. The mrs had slightly more adventurous ideas!
Dark gravel with a white path! What could possibly go wrong??
So I set it up with paper marking out the path



And then went for it with the white gravel and in went the water.



I was actually pretty pleased, but still worried about the long term maintenance of black and white gravel so close!
We put some Mollies in to start



They had a month or so and then we added a pair of Angelfish





The path is wrecked now, black gravel knocked on to the white by the fish rooting about, as I suspected!




I'm going to put a small wall of slate along the path to separate the black and white and see how that goes!

 

I used to have one that size....then we started moving alot and it was a pain to move. Your tank looks great.

 

im a fish guy have had tanks off and on for most of my life (had wondered how the gravel cleaning wass goin got go with a path) canister filtes are the way to go for sure. right now i only have a 46G bow front tank but at one point i had abt 200g of tanks including breeding setups

 

That is a pretty cool tank setup Warren. I think your path looks cool with a little mix in it. But I guess over time it will deteriorate. That might be cool too though.

Seems things have changed since I was big into it. That filter arrangement is very nice.
I've been thinking about getting a nice tank going again. I've had a lot of fish over the years, but am thinking just bluegill. They are actually a pretty cool looking and interesting cichlid.
But you gotta love the classics. Angels and mollies! Those angels should help keep the molly population in check.

 

Good looking aquarium!

 

Thanks guys!

That's the first filter of this type that I have had, had the usual "in tank" filters before, much prefer this set up.
There are so many interesting fish out there! It's hard to decide on what type of tank to set up as you end up excluding some nice fish whatever you do it seems!

 

That is absolutely true! African cichlids are probably the most varied that can all live together. But many of them are still very aggressive.

 

This is a joint aquarium for me and the mrs, so we kind of have fish we both like. I'm already thinking of my own tank though!
It's still hard to have a plan though, really like a lot of the Cichlids and also a lot of Plecos, and then the Discus keep grabbing my attention as well

 

Agree, I ended up with a super aggressive red devil cichlid. He ended up killing everything in the tank and had the entire 50 gallon tank to himself. He grew to a ripe old age and eventually developed mass on his head. He was close to 12 or 15 years old.

 

Looks great Warren.

 

Thanks Mike!
Went for another look about today and saw this Flowerhorn! First time I've seen one in the flesh, pretty impressive creature and about 8" long

 

Hows the tank doing Warren?

 

Doing great so far, Jim, all the fish seem happy in there.
The path is a mess as I suspected it would be, mrs really likes it so I might try and do a fixed version out of acrylic with aquarium safe silicon spread over and then the gravel poured on and then the excess shaken off, only way I can see this working!

 

Glad to hear that its settled in nicely!

 

Oh man, that was my hobby for my whole life but had to shut it down 10 years or so ago, travel too much and the wife will surely kill everything (she's amazing in just about everything else but living things...)

I started with freshwater and got to turn our fountain and small pool into ponds/aquariums - to this date no clue how my parents let me do that. Actually made a small business out of it selling plant and some fish, got to procreate Goldfish 2-3 times, nothing like a fully grown goldfish and in all the variations and splendor, all between 12-15 yo.

Dove into saltwater 15 years later and bug bit me hard, had 90 and 200gls, spent a fortune and really hard to keep all those buggers alive but i was mostly into the equipment and trying new things so probably never got fully stable, was already busy with work and "life" so couldn't devote to it. At the very end had some very cool eels that survived because, well, they eat everything that went into the tank, even lionfish.

Don't even have any photos and forgot all my login detail for the forum I was in, shame.

 

Really hope you can get your photo's one day @Antonio!
Would love to see some of your tanks and fish.