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.

Bloody hell, a 1000 gallon pond, bet that was something?

If I ever won loads of money on the lottery, I would purchase a really big house, have a huge extension built with a massive indoor pond. The pond would be about 6 foot deep and you could walk around the edge and look through windows , Little bit like a commercial aquarium, or when you watch dolphins. I would have the most advanced filtration possible, the stuff that you find in the big aquariums. Apart from the obvious Oscars, I would have arowana and pacu and massive shoals of tetra. Mind you, I would have to win a few million.

Oh well, it's nice dreaming, back to reality now

The pond was amazing it was built from concrete blocks with a 3 x 3 1inch thick glass at the front i used to sit with him for ages and watch the interaction of the fish. The plecs even spawned in the tank and he got around 100 small plecs which he sold to the lfs. He also had 2 5x2x2 tanks linked up to it. The room was heated by a small gas wall heater which was ample for the pond and used to keep it at around 80 degrees. Here is a pic of my set up when it was feateured in practical fish keeping sorry its a bit tatty but it was back in 1994

From what I can see, it looks really impressive. Hopefully you can post some better pictures in the gallery at some stage. The problem with this hobby, the more you get into it, the bigger you want to go. Don't think I'm going to be able to get any bigger than 300 gallons though. Not unless I move, or even better win the lottery that reminds me, must start in the Euro lottery again.

I just replied to your pm about the dvds but im not sure if it was sent to you it said that it didn't authenticate to the server.Can you check and get back to me