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New Tank Problems, the UGLY PHASE! Custom Axolotl Aquarium Update video

By Andrew Windham on

Speaker: What's going on, guys? I hope everybody had a great Christmas and a happy New Year. I left my tank alone for a while. I came by to feed it, but I was-- I went to home for the holidays too. I've shown you the best of what this tank looks like, and now I want to show you what the worst of it looks like. It's gotten brown algae all over it. Pretty bad. This is all right because little buddy's fine, and they're are all fine. No one's being affected by this, really. It's just not pretty to look at brown algae, right?

You guys saw that really greenscape that had the marimo moss all over it. What happened was, brown algae is really common in new aquariums.

I didn't have anything to-- I didn't have a heavy plant load that could out-compete the brown algae, which is why when you see these big planted aquariums, you don't really have that much of an issue with brown algae. I had all that marimo mosss, which is actually another form of algae, but it's not, by any means, better at all at out-competing brown algae. It just got coated in it, and it was dying off. I went ahead and just ripped it all off, which is fine because it was an easy way to do this and it looked nice, but I really did want to plant this with other plants more heavily.

What I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be just planting it. I'm going to buy a lot of plants, and I'm going to coat it again with proper plants that will actually out-compete this. Right now, I have to figure out how to deal with this. I haven't done any maintenance on this tank, so you can actually probably see on the walls, it's a little thicker. You can see it growing on little pieces of the filtration and growing up here. It's just nasty, but I'll be able to take care of it. You can really easily wipe it off of things.

Now, one thing it feeds on, though, that I didn't think of is phosphates and silicates, which is present in my tap water in Corpus Christi. I got sand, so there's a good chance that this is releasing some phosphates or silicates in there too. It's a new system, so it's just thriving as everything tries to reach a balance and there's nothing there to take it up yet. What I'll probably do is, I don't know, I'll figure it out. I can't really get invertebrates that will eat this stuff just because of this dude, but I might buy a team to come clean it up, move him to another tank, and move him back when they're done. Then re-home them accordingly.

I'll show you guys what happens, but today's just an update video. I've been really busy trying to get everything back and in the groove of things. Now, I'm about to take care of this tank and clean it up real nice. I hope everyone had a great time and that school wasn't kicking your butt again really soon. Thanks for coming by. Thanks for watching this video. I can talk all about brown algae or whatever other kinds of algae if you guys ever need that information or if you have any question in the comment. I'm going to go ahead and take care of this and next video should be me-- I don't know, but I think I should be adding something to the tank. All right. Thanks for watching, guys.

About Andrew Windham

Andrew needed a custom stand, canopy and filter system to fit a non-standard aquarium for his axolotl. This video series features installing the Seamless Sump filter, H2Overflow and Siphon Stopper on an aquarium.

"This is the introduction to what will be a project series called the Axolotl Aquarium Upgrade. Custom Aquariums sponsored the build and made the equipment to go along. This series will cover everything from putting the tank, stand, and canopy together to plumbing, filtration, aquascaping, stocking, flow control, and much much more! Create your own dream aquarium with Custom Aquariums here: customaquariums.com."

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