Over the course of the last seven months, the ecosystem that would become OnlyFinss HQ has undergone changes.
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Some of them good but most of them bad.
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Let us say that amateur enthusiasm and rushed Googling does not a good fishkeeper make! We've lost fish, quite a lot of them. We've made mistakes but we have learned from them, we have moved on and sought solutions, and we have prevailed. OnlyFinss HQ is now a vibrant and dynamic enclosed ecosystem. We have had some recent births and the little ones appear to prosper; we take this as a great sig. We have pregnant guppies still and a growing, thought tightly controlled snail population. The flora does as well as the fauna.
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In essence, OnlyFinss HQ is a 55 litre (don't ask me gallons, American friends) steel-framed tank with a Forever Speed UV hang-on filter for cleaning and a JBL CristalProfi 405 canister filter doing the heavy lifting, Seachem Matrix keeping the balance. It wasn't always that way, I've tried multiple filter brands and types before arriving at a working setup. I've tried interior filters of all kinds only to have them all scummed and attracting detritus of all kinds, including a dead pleco or two. The JBL beastie is a champion and the ForeverSpeed fella cleans green water in hours. I can't complain. We also have a Chihiros B45 light with a phone app programmed day/night cycle and , in the cupola above, an unbranded light programmed over TP-Link Smart Plugs to give a moonlight cycle, and a big beast Eheim double air pump,
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The more observant among you might notice the boxes stuck to the sides of the tank, well done! Those are where the cameras are hidden (except for the Blink Mini on its stand). Again, with TP-Links, we have a Tapo C-100 on the right and a Tapo C-210 on the left, under the big balcony type thing, as a 180 degree camera needs more space and the balcony looks great, especially with the nautical rope supports! These are the nerve centre of OnlyFinss. Through OBS Studio's free streaming software, we send out our message to the world. I chose the Tapos because they're decently-priced and allow the RTSP streaming I needed to do this. The Blink Mini doesn't do that but it gives a nice overhead view of the developing flora of OnlyFinss HQ.