We are getting there slowly, have got the sump plumbed in now.



Check this lovely piece of wood I've got for my new Amazon tank. It weighs a bloody ton

That's a huge peice of driftwood...

Great isn't it? Only problem is, it's going to put a lot of tanning into the water. I might have a couple of bags of charcoal in the filter to help remove the tanning.

The charcoal will help but you are just gonna have to accept that the tank is gonna have a yellow tinge for a while.

While you are waiting for your tank to get set up, soak the wood in water(if you can find a big enough container) and change the water every day. This will get the process of removing the yellow started

I used quite a lot of wood in my aquarium but I hate tannins in my water. I placed 5 bags of BioZorb (at a cost of $100 AU)in my sump and that kept the water crystal clear for 5 months.
They have only recently stopped working and I will replace them. As a rule of thumb you need one bag per 200 liters.

When i first got into Oscars a friend of mine had a 1000 gallon pond in his concrete shed down the end of his garden. It was pretty amazing to see what he had in there. He had 100's of guppies that used to breed like flies he had orange swordtails some of which reached 5 inches and 5 huge plecs like youve never seen. He also had two of the largest Oscars ive ever seen. The guppies and swordtails were such prolific breeders that the Oscars could eat as many as they wanted but just couldnt keep the population down. Every now and then he would put a net in and fish out a bucket load and take them to the local shop. Back in the nineties i had some of the first albinos to come into the uk and grew them on and spawned them. I gave 12 of them to him and he grew them on in his pond for me and within 10 months we had 12 huge albinos. I let him pick out a pair and bought the rest home and used them to breed with other Oscars that i had.