hi everyone welcome back to my video. Today i'm going to show you how to set up a shrimp tank
for caridina shrimp with undergravel filter box. I found that this method works the best for keeping
high-end caridina shrimps such as Taiwan and pinto shrimp and once I tried this method I had a much
better result compared to traditional methods with the thick layer of the soil at the bottom of the
tank which i used before. I learned this method from Darick probably one of the biggest shrimp
breeder in Asia Darick runs his own business which called Shrimp Affair and has a physical shop in
Singapore where you can come and buy shrimps and equipment. He has more than 20 years of experience
in shrimp keeping and he tried every single method of filtration in the past and he choose UGF method
which works the best for him. He has many hundreds of shrimp tanks and he mainly breeds caridinia,
neocaridina and Sulawesi shrimps and all his shrimp tanks equip only with one ugf filter box.
Darick is very generous guy and he shares his experience with everyone who's interested in
shrimp keeping hobby. He doesn't have any secrets with you guys and he gave
me tons of information and answered on all my questions even before i bought something
from him. I'm going to leave a link to his Facebook page in my description box below.
For this method you need an active soil, bacterial powder and acrylic or glass UGF filter box. I'm
going to explain in more details how to make and where to get this box at the end of the video.
it's very important to choose a good quality active soil for the tank. high end Caridina
shrimp or also known as a shadow shrimp prefer ph below 6 and ideally close to 5.5 and your soil
should be able to lower ph of the water to this level and keep it this way for at least a year.
I would recommend using Amazonia 1 soil which I think is the most popular among the breeders
and the problem is that this soil is not very easy to get and it's depending where you are and if you
can't find this soil you need to look for some other options available in your country. I would
also recommend an active soil called Ista shrimp ph 5.5. it can lower ph to about 5.5-5.7 range
from my experience and it's more affordable than ada amazonia. In my shrimp tank setup I'm
using bacterial powder which i bought from Shrimp Affair, as an alternative option i can recommend
sl aqua magic powder which also works well from my experience. It works as a food to grow biofilm in
your tank which is very important for your shrimp especially for your baby shrimps. As a first step
you need to fill the box with the soil and add a little bit of soil to the bottom of your tank
just enough to cover the bottom of your tank with a very thin layer of soil.
This way you avoid building up waste inside your soil which can be very dangerous for your shrimp
in the long run. Then you need to sprinkle your bacterial powder on top of your soil
after you add your bacterial powder it's time to fill your tank with water. I would recommend using
pure RO water without any minerals because you are going to do a few water changes during this setup
and you just waste your minerals if you add them at this stage. When i add the water i do it slowly
to make sure i don't disturb much of the powder. The goal is to make the most of the powder stay
on the soil and don't forget to add the water into your UGF box before to add the water in your tank
otherwise they float. I made this mistake in the past. Once you fill the tank with the water
put the light on the timer for approximately 10 hours a day and leave it for two weeks.
After approximately two weeks biofilm should start to grow on the soil and this is when i do my first
water change. I change around 30 to 50% of water and i add bacterial powder to feed beneficial
bacteria in the taml. I sprinkle approximately one gram of powder on the surface of the water and now
we just wait for another two or three weeks. okay we're back now and it's week five. A lot of algae
start to grow on the glass on the surface of these tanks i just cleaned front glass. It was covered
with algae as well and you can compare it with the tanks below which is about three weeks old
and i didn't clean the glass and then you can see the algae start to grow here as well
and now i want to do another water change and before we do another water change i want to
quickly check water parameters. here you see three tubes - one for ammonia one for nitrites
and one for nitrates. You can see we still have a little bit ammonia in the tanks. We
need to wait for a little bit longer. I'm gonna do water change add a little bit more bacteria
and wait for another week and if there is no ammonia left we can do another last water change.
okay guys we're back and it's week number six since we start cycling the tanks
and now the cycle is completed. I just checked the water parameters and you can see the test
tubes over here. Here you can see the ammonia is zero nitrite is zero and nitrate is quite high
because all this ammonia been eaten by bacteria and converted to nitrate so all we need to do at
this stage is to do a massive water change make sure we withdraw as much as possible
of that nitrate, make the water nice and clean and then of course we're gonna add our shrimps
and now you can see the moment when i'm adding the shrimps into these tanks and if you want
to see how i selected these shrimps you can check my previous video. At this stage we have a lot of
natural foods such as algae and biofilm available for the shrimps and i don't normally feed them for
at least one week and by now you should have lots of microflora in your tank particularly copepods
which i believe are a good sign of healthy and well established tank. These creatures thrive
when they have plenty of available food around and they feed on biofilm and algae the same natural
food which are very beneficial for your shrimps and essential food for baby shrimps to survive.
And now we back after 5 weeks since we added shrimps. As you can see they're ate most of the
algae and now I'm starting to feed them daily.This time i added few berried red steel females.
They have been crossed with the black galaxies and they hatch a lot of babies by now.
Most of them are black Pintos but i also can see some red Pintos and blue bolt shrimp plates here
the other tank with black Pintos is also doing well they haven't started breeding yet because
most of their shrimps haven't fully grown yet. Recently i had a lot of questions from my viewers
they asking me how to clean this filter and the short answer is that in most cases you
don't need to do that. Sometime normally in the first month or two you might experience a small
issue when your water flow from the filter is reduced slightly it happen due to the high amount
of waste. When you start cycling your tanks you add a large amount of bacterial powder which is
then eaten by microorganisms and converted to waste and it looks like brown dust. This dust
might clog your soil and reduce the water flow. A quick fix would be to poke it with the tweezers
and simply rotate them to disturb the soil. The dust will settle to the bottom of the filter
and then water flow should be back to normal. This might be a link to another slight issue - the dust
eventually can be lifted out from the filter into your tank and muddy your water again it
mostly happened in the beginning and should be settle in a few months. You can easily fix this
issue by adding a sponge filter to polish your water. Another thing you might be experiencing
is that over the time your soil at the bottom of the tank might move to the back of the tank
it's mostly due to your shrimp always digging the soil and with the help of the water flow
it eventually moving towards the back. It's not ideal because it will create a thicker layer of
the soil in one place which can link to building excess waste inside the soil. So what i normally
do is i move the soil back to the front with a small net. You don't need to distribute it over
the bottom of the tank instead just create a pile at the front and your stream will do the rest.
Okay now let's talk quickly about water change. I would recommend changing 10 percent of the water
weekly and adding it slowly back into the tanks to avoid quick ph changes. Your fresh RO water
normally has a high ph and it slightly increases ph in your tank when you do water changes. After
each water change i normally add a little amount of bacterial powder to feed beneficial bacteria in
the tank to maintain biofilm growth and i don't feed my shrimps that day. This is the only time
i add powder food into my tanks once a week after water changes and the rest of the time i feed my
shrimps with solid food daily. and now i'm gonna show you quickly how i make these UGF boxes.
A lot of you guys asking me where to buy these boxes, how to make them so now i'm gonna show you
how i do them if you can order acrylic glass online made to measure that would be much easier
but if you can't you can just make it from the glass and silicon like i made this one
i maybe do the later video on how to do it from from glass yeah so today we're just going to
concentrate on how to make them uh how to make the filters yeah so this set is very
great so if you can buy this set it's called ISTA underground filter accessory system yeah so if
you can buy this set that would be fantastic. so if you look for this set online try to find them
i only find one seller in uk who sell them and he he is on ebay so it's he's selling sometimes
sometimes not so let me just show you what including this set so in this set you have
you have this tube extendable tube you have two plates which you can basically clip together but
you don't want to because it's only designed for one box and you have this thing to attach the tube
because it has some pins here just to attach the two plates together so they stick out a little bit
so you need to cut them off so you just take the knife and then cut it with a knife just like this
okay we cut this one you can see that you don't need to throw it away
instead you just put it in another slot like this let me just try it
again like this so and you close this gap because you don't want this gap otherwise your soil goes
through the gap unless you put the sponge on top of this plate so you cut all of them
okay done you see it fits completely perfect here then also you need to cut this thing
yeah
what you need to do when you order these boxes if you can make find find the company who made to
measure these boxes so all you need to do ask them you need to measure this plate width and yeah with
the basically should be the same and tell them the internal measurements so this one for example
i think it's like 147 by 147 millimeters it's 14.7 centimeters here and you just ask him let's make
this size is 14.7 by 14.7 and by 10 centimeters or something or 11 centimeters i make it normally
same i made this glass you see i'm probably going to make another video to show you how to make this
glass box from glass. what if you cannot find this set i have another option for you so if you can't
find this set because this set is is perfect you just come with everything yeah but and it's
perfectly fitted like this yeah but if you cannot find this set you might find these plates. I found
them on ebay and they came from China. Very cheap plates. I think i pay five dollars for
10 of them or something like this so and you also can find this like typical underground
uh lifting tube here this also can be easily find on ebay or amazon or something
some other website google or something so when you buy this thing you might buy you might get
your box which is slightly bigger than this plate for example this one and you have some gaps around
yeah that's fine you can put a sponge here but first we need to attach this tube you see this
come with the different fitting which is not fitting to this
plate so you need to think something about yeah i normally put it like
in the middle here at the back and then just to cut cut an opening here
you can use this tool oh yes it's easy this tool
doesn't need to be very accurate because you're going to put a sponge anyway
so cut this thing
and now we need to attach the tube so we need to mark it like this
and then
you cut first you cut from top and then you cut it
yeah okay now it's perfect so basically you're gonna cut it this way uh so when you glue it
it has some support at the bottom so when you adjust it and press it it's not gonna crack and
push down yeah actually that image happened with me so you better to do it like this way yeah make
sure you glue it straight don't glue it like in an angle because it's not going to look right
yeah like this i have two combining glue so i need to spray this thing on the surface and then
don't forget to take the level with you yeah more or less i hope table is level
table is pretty much level
like this
and that should fit perfectly yeah now cut around the pipe
here you go you have a little sponge and now your saw will not get into the bottom of the filter
that's pretty much it yeah okay guys i hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give me a
like and don't forget to subscribe to my channel if you'd like to find out more about this filter
please check this video out and thanks so much for watching and i'll see you next time cheers