FBN Tank with Home Made Cooler

[wargar]

Hi,
Hers is my FNB tank, it's 36x18x24 inches and filled to about the 20 inch mark and has a cork bark island. The tank is well planted with lots of hiding places for the 7 adults who live there.

It has 2 x internal canaster filters that have pipes conected to take any flow to the surface.

The cooling system is a polly box with 5 metres of hose inside filled with freezer blocks. The blocks last about 12 hours and cools the tank down to 16-18 degrees year round.

The newts share this tank with a handfull of common water snails and some shrimps. I use gravel and have never had a problem with ingestion.

Please feel free to comment, good or bad as if I can improve anything I will.

Cheers

Dave

 

[Azhael]

That´s quite a lovely tank! And really big, i´m sure the newts apreciate all that space.
There are a couple of suggestions i would make. The first one would be to change the substrate. Gravel is terrible...it traps huge amounts of debris, difficultates feeding and can be accidentally ingested with dire results. Sand or bare bottom are much better choices.
The other suggestion is to increase even more the amount of plants (although your tank is nicely planted) or at least have an area where plants reach the surface in abundance so that the newts can support themselves to poke their heads out. You wouldn´t believe the difference that makes, they really like dense areas of vegetation.

Nice work with the cooling system. Those temps year-round are perfect for this species specially with a slight drop during winter.

 

[wargar]

Thanks for the comments. Next time I strip the tank down I will probably use a sand substrate. As for the plants a few of them are starting to break the surface now and more will in the near future. The newts do like to hang around in the plants near the surface.

Dave