If you’re new to this space, you know that one of my less-weird hobbies is keeping freshwater tropical fish and live plants. For most of the last decade, I’ve been running basically the same 29 gallon aquarium. It’s served nicely, although it’s gotten a little long in the tooth; I’ve been replacing pieces slowly over the last year – the original light crapped out, so I got a nice Fluval LED rig; the original plastic lid broke, so I got a nice glass one. Last week, one of the cats jumped on top and cracked the inner rim of the top of the frame, almost falling in (hilariously), testing the waterproofing of the lighting rig, and requiring a hasty repair involving “duct tape keeping the roof from falling in.” It was time for a new glass box.

Having a nicely sized wooden stand/cabinet for the aquarium, I didn’t want to give that up, but figured if I was replacing it, I might as well go bigger. I found the biggest 30×12 footprint tank I could, a 37 gallon tall; it would fit the hole, and add the extra volume in height. Not the most common tank, but easily procurable online. I spent the weekend down at the con checking the shipping status, and hoping beyond hope that I wouldn’t end up with a big box full of shards of glass.

Luckily, it arrived Monday night in one piece (with lots of bubble wrap). I’d procured a couple of odds and ends in the meantime – new substrate (a nice coarse sand in black), and some neat, cheap, low-tech decor items; a couple of terra cotta flower pots, and a few two dollar acrylic suction cup soap dishes with drain holes, with an eye toward filling the vertical space with multi-level aquascaping.

After work today, I spent several hours draining, moving, filling, re-arranging, netting, and all that, and you can see the result below:

I like it; it’s cleaner than the old one; I hope it stays that way; I think the added depth to the tank will help diffuse the light a bit, keeping the plants going but avoiding much of the algae. I’m in love with the substrate (sand! so much more natural that gravel), and if the java moss grows the way I hope it does from the little racks, I think it’ll look really cool as time goes on.

For you aquaria purists, I expect it’ll cycle just fine – that driftwood is straight out of the old tank (I just yanked some of the moss off it), as are the river rocks; those flowerpots with the java ferns and aponogetons are full of the old gravel; likewise, all the plants (save those new java ferns) went in without a rinse. Also, I just moved the well-seasoned filter directly over and will run it for a couple of weeks and monitor levels; the population right now is pretty small – a small school (10?) of black neon tetras, two bristle-nose plecostomus (the ones that only get about four inches long), two old black mollies, and a few amano shrimp and nerite snails.

Anyway, gaze upon it’s greatness. I just wanted to show it off.