Planted or Bare Bottom?

[Tariq]

Obviously a planted tank looks so much better. However, if your a breeder I think (having no experience) that it could hamper the ease of breeding and cleaning your tank. So my question is if it is better have a bare bottom tank or a planted tank?

[ILLUSN]

planted tank for display 9It's always to have a REALLY nice looking tank in your lounge room)

bare bottom for breeding and growing up fry

[Greggy]

Planted takes also seem to have less cases of HITH and other vitamin deficient related diseases. Plants also consume ammonia and nitrate as well as other potentially nasty chemicals, so yes go with a planted tank!

And don't be worried about plants not growing well, just get good lighting and the fertiliser right and you'll be fine. I'm now running a DIY two x 2L bottle yeast based CO2 injection system with an efficient high-tech DIY injector and I'm throwing away so many plants because of the growth it's criminal! All up it cost me like $50.00 :)

Regards,

Greggy

[Siklidkid]

Why not have the best of both worlds
PLANTED BARE-BOTTOM
You can achieve this by planting the plants into a small pot, i would put something like small pieces of driftwood or make a 'wall' of rocks across the front of the pots to conceal them.

Or you can get plants like hygro or ambulia which grow like gang busters even without any substrate. All you need is something to hold them down like a plant weight (ive used roofing lead cut into tiny strips before) not sure if the lead is safe however i dont think it will be an issue if your doing atleast weekly water changes.

If not using substrate, adding K and Fe chelate to the water column will really get the plants going (assuming you will have fish in it which are producing N and P)

Pretty much the only extra work will be pruning the plants which is too easy.

Get Sylvannia Gro-lux tubes. cool whites just dont make the cut when it comes to growing plants. gro-lux are only $18 for a 4ft tube and will grow plants as well as the $30+ tubes.