The plants are all Cryptocoryne spp., which I have had some luck with. The lighting is two 4 foot daylight T8's from Home Depot at <$4/bulb - seems to work just fine and gives a nice light in my opinion. Water is moved around by 2 Korallia and 1 Aquaclear (fitted with filter) powerheads, plus a canister filter. The substrate is mostly Target pool filter sand, which seems to work very well for both plants and fish. Algae were a bit of a problem during cycling, but now that I have all the algae eaters in there (3 Ancistrus sp. BN plecos, 2 Chaetostomasp. rubbernose plecos, 4 Otocinclus sp., and 4 Crossocheilus siamensis (SAEs)) I hardly have to do any algae cleaning at all.
The loaches I have are 5 clown loaches (two 4 inchers and three 1.5-2 inchers), 10 Botia kubotai ("polkadot"), 10 B. striata (zebra loach), and about 10 kuhlis (mix of Pangio kuhli and P. myersi). Then there's some corys, and too many giant danios (I call them the sharks because of their feeding frenzy behaviour at feeding time), black neon tetras, along with a few phantom tetras, all fish I bought for cycling purposes. Finally a few cardinal tetras and about 10 black ruby barbs, that were supposed to have been Puntius pentazona. You add that all up and you'll get too many fish, but try to get anything out of that tank without tearing it apart!!! So I change water a lot!!
Anyway, so far so good! Hope you like it (in spite of the crowding.....)
