Inga51

I wouldn't recommend putting shellies in as I had caudos and ending up front food
Oh and I have two regani at 9 cm who breed constantly in there

The whole breeding thing is a tough one for me. I like to have a nice looking display, which will end up including some decent rockscape (yet to be designed). This makes recovery of holding females difficult at best, especially in a 2.5' deep tank that is 6' long. I completely gave up on the Tropheus in that regard. They would breed constantly, and most of the fry ended up as food. I had a pile of rubble-fist sized rocks at one end of the tank, designed to be a refuge for fry, which worked nicely. Then I would regularly find fry in the weir, which would get netted and transferred into the grow-out cube. But now that I'm getting something a bit more fancy (F1 fronts) etc, letting nature take its course seems wasteful. But catching holding females seems like it's going to be major challenge, as is catching hatched fry from Calvus etc. 

Anything that isn't dimmable imo [emoji16]

It sounds like a base model LED (cheapest) would do it. I'm a fan of dimmable lights though so I can experiment on what works best.

I'm not sure swapping to another blue light would work as blue light penetrates water very well - I'd get dimmable white light LEDs and lower light until algae slows down.


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This is a good suggestion, and perhaps (prior to the) next time the T5 tubes need replacing I should investigate switching to an LED unit for the whole tank. My tank is set up as an in-wall build, with cabinets running floor to ceiling. This leaves ~600-700mm between the top of the tank and the ceiling, enclosed within cabinets. I'm sure the decreased heat of LEDs would be a good thing as well. I added some 250x250mm ceiling vents to help move heat and humid air into the roof cavity, but it still gets pretty toasty, and damp in there. Plus LEDs would probably be cheaper to run than my 2x 80W T5s that aren't dimmable. 

There are probably rules about posting suggestions for products, perhaps people could PM me with some units that I could look at. I see, from my very brief search, that 120-150cm units run from a couple of hundred through to $4000+. I would love to make use of some technology with timers, sunset/sunrise, moon light (maybe even lunar cycles?), and anything else that's useful. But I don't want to break the bank either. 

TBH algae growth is much slower in the tank now that I don't have a huge colony of adult Tropheus in there, as the feeding regime is so much lighter now. I wonder whether the type of algae growing also changes with blue (or dimmer) light? I used to have an issue with a dark purple algae that was really hard to scrub off. Needed to us a hand scraper as the magnet cleaner didn't budge it. But now, I think I've run the magnet cleaner over the front (and back) glass one in a few weeks, only cleaning a very light film of brown algae.

Sounds almost identical to my setup I put some comb up and glued it in place with gold label silicon worked a treat.
I keep 6 bar Burundis with some julidechromis regani , black calvus and ventralis chituta

Thanks for your feedback Mike. Are you able to share some photos of the comb? Where did you source it?

Could you share some numbers on size and stocking and your tank?

I've seen pictures of Regani and haven't been a fan of the look personally. The Chituta look quite interesting, well at least the male does. But I read that they would be very shy in a tank where they aren't the dominant species. Do yours swim freely with the Fronts around?

For lighting look at getting a basic LED light unit.
You can also get an LED moon light cheap enough, here's the one on my 6x2x2:
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