The Puffer Forum

I've been prepping my 10G for a puffer for awhile and now it's cycled and stable so I'm in the home stretch. I've been collecting everything I might want for the tank and yesterday I went out and bought the last of the supplies.
I know they like a lot of hides and cool stuff to check out, so I thought I'd get it pretty well filled up with complex driftwood pieces, and I found a really nice fake plant with really long branches that float and cover a lot of the top. I also have some live plants. Now I just want to make sure it's not TOO full. Does it seem like there's enough swimming room? There are two large driftwood pieces in there right now, I could remove one and replace it with the smaller one in the second picture, or remove it altogether. I could also add the smaller piece back how it was in the second picture, I had removed it because I thought it looked too crowded that way. I could add a little bit more plants, but I don't have a ton of low light plants to work with and for now I'm out of spending money for new ones.

Anyway, I've included the second picture because after that point I was experimenting with different bulbs and one of the sockets broke. I'm getting a different (working!) hood from a friend later, but hopefully you can see the setup in there well enough from these.

Also, does the lighting seem okay? I know it shouldn't be too bright. I could use dimmer bulbs than these but all I have is a pretty big step down and it's very dim and yellow in there, and I thought with all the shade it seemed alright, but I want to make sure. But of course my phone camera tried to brighten up the picture for me so it looks a little brighter than it is. It's a pair of 10 watt 6500K fluorescent bulbs. The lighting can only be kind of observed as intended in the second picture, since again, after that picture the left socket was shot.


1. Front view as is


2. Front view with smaller driftwood piece and full lighting


3. Top view


4. View from right side


5. View from left side


Thank you for any help and advice!

How deep is that sand? I'd lower it to 1". or you're gonna be stirring all of every week.

It suddenly got a lot deeper once I pushed all that driftwood into it...lol! I noticed that too. I'll pull some of it out, thanks.

But other than that does it look okay?

Looks great!

Is the filter cycled?

Personally, I would want more smallish plants (whether real or artificial). From what I can see of the pictures (I have poor vision) it looks like you have pretty long sight lines. I like really short sight lines for DPs. It helps keep the peace in my experience.

Thank you guys! Indeed it's cycled and stable, pretty much ready to go as soon as I'm confident it's ready.

I'm having trouble squeezing little plants in since the driftwood covers so much of the ground, lol. It's hard to tell but in the back the piece on the left sharply slopes down and covers pretty much the entire corner behind it, so everything you can't see from the front is pretty much covered. It's hard to capture in pictures but I squeezed a little fake plant in the back behind the two pieces of driftwood and I placed a little java fern with tons of babies in the back corner behind the left piece. I also moved some things around and added a couple little plants in the front, as well as moving the front anubias a bit so that it has more to work with at lower levels. And I pulled out about half of the sand.

How's it look? Excuse the cloudiness, it got pretty stirred up when I pulled the sand out and I also had to change most of the water. It's looking really bright in there because of the light reflecting off of all the little particles in the water, but it's really not that bright at all!

Looks much better!

Looks good, how about some anubias on the driftwood? May help with breaking lines of sight

It does look better! Cloudiness goes away as the filter pads age a bit.

For post-in-tank work photos you can cheat if you know anyone with an old Diatom filter. Run that for a half hour to an hour and the tank becomes artificially squeaky clean. No real operating tank ever looks that good all the time except for the few anal folks who run diatoms full time (not me Charlie Brown!).

Adding floss to my filter always clears tanks up, crystal clear.

But squeaky-clean and/or diatomed tanks don't have infusoria for newly hatched fry. In theory the DPs don't need such, but some infusoria is a safety net.