Hi everyone, I thought I'd show some progress this is from May - Now. I've started with a 20 gallon at the beginning and a flood light but soon moved it all to a 29 gallon and Chihiros A series. I kinda miss the 6500k, the Chihiros is definitely more blue which doesn't look too great on an iron glass.
Filling in very nice! Did you have to clip and replant the pearlweed or did it propogate like that on its own? If you dim your lights a bit you should get less algae, and maybe consider some snails to help keep the glass clean.
I applaud the DIY water bottle filters. You can also stuff them full of lava rock for more bio filtration or with pot scrubbers for mechanical. If you can get your hands on some good drift wood or rocks, then you can hide them behind (pm me if you want some big pieces of quartz - I have lots).
Keep up the good work and keep posting progress! I'm curious to see how that pearlweed takes off with the Chihiros blasting on it.
I started out having to clip (when I was using floodlights). You may find if you got malaysian snails they would sometimes uproot your carpet, I wish I never had them. If you look on the black substrate, I got that from one clipping in a week or 2 solely through Chihiros, some PPS style ferting and DIY root tab.
If you haven't found out yet, with high light the pearlweed will naturally carpet since the shoots will lean down towards the substrate and then propagate outwards.
About the water bottle, one of them is my ugly but workable spray bar hooked up to a pond filter. The one on the left is actually a in tank CO2 reactor with poly batting to slow down the pressure on the output. It works really nice since it keeps all or at least majority of the co2 dissolved in water. A problem if you have DIY CO2 like yeast is that you may have to release the pump because one of the first things that go into your reactor at the start of a new solution is "air" not CO2. Which takes a lot longer to dissolve.
Also as a side note, having quilt batting inside a bottle like that I find is extremely good at removing green water(free floating algae). I think this concept is known as a water polisher. Every few days or even every day I'd rinse the batting material in water and wow, a lot of green stuff comes out and my tank looks noticeable clearer. (sadly in the picture is saturated in green, but the water is actually quite clear.)
Updated to include some September progress
Update: April 25, 2018