This is my first cold water setup, started in October 2011, when I bought a curious aquarium (bow front, short depth) I saw on maltapark. I wanted to use this for experimentation kind of. First I wanted to try Cloud Mountain Minnows, plants in a sandy bottom, a ramshorn snail population as feeder for assasins in another aquarium and also to see the largest I could get them to grow. Next summer I hope to use this aquarium also as a refugium for shrimps as the temp in my larger aquarium goes up to 31 and I loose most of them usually. This aquarium being small I can carry to cooler parts of my home.
I started by cleaning the aquarium from some lime scale using acid.
Then I modified the filter box (1st of the kind for me) the inlet was at the top of the box and the drain at the bottom so it never filled up. I didn't like the setup so I found a hose pipe, cut a part from the top of it and stuck it into the drain hole to make like an overflow drain high at the top of the box. This caused the filter box to fill up before it can start to drain. It worked. I also replaced a mesh and charcoal filter with mesh and biohome so try to have biological filtration.
As it got colder and the room where it stays dropped to 13°C I noticed the CMM stressted (listing like sinking submarines!) I placed a 50W heater and kicked the temp up to 17°C they have been very well since then. This is costing me about 3 units a week (including pump and light).
Finally last shutdown I installed the lights. The original lights were 3 white LED strips, which were very dim and had some burned out individual LEDs. It was always like a moonlight. I think they were dim mainly because they were powered off the 12V AC power supply for the pump. So I thought about changing to 12V DC and replacing the LEDs. According to several websites white LEDs have a strong Blue light component but no very little red light. So I planned to do 3 white LED strips and one red LED strip to have compensate the red light spectrum for plants. I bought everything from eBay and once installed it produced a very pleasing strong light.
I placed some plants: (Hygrophilla difformis, Hygrophilla polysperma and Java fern) the first grew a bit but produced deformed leaves probably because it was cold, polysperma is growing very slow even at 17°C, Java fern is also showing no growth yet. I hope in spring when temp goes up these will grow again.
Below are some photos of the history of this aquarium.