Aquariums: My low maintenance aquarium

Age since setup: 11 months.

Aquarium: Juwel Lido 200 liters.

Filter: built in, stock, with additional ceramic media.

Light: 590 mm DAY and NATURE LEDs

Stock heater, on all the time, keeps the water 21.5 C in the winter, up to 24 C in the summer.

No air bubbler or CO2 injection.

Stock plastic lid it came with.

Scape: i think some aqua soil, some root tabs, small amount of sand over it, some small rocks over that, some dragon stones, some driftwood (all sourced from pet store).

How I started it:

Setup the substrate + plants, fill with tap water, add Seachem prime and some beneficial bacteria, wait 3 weeks with lights and filter running (lights were just on a few hours per day), then started adding fish, roughly a month apart for each species.

Species of Fish:

– 10 neon tetras

– 5 mature guppy + many fry

– 5 cory (i think julii)

– a few otocinclus

– lots of small ramshorn + bladder snails

– a few amano and neocaridina shrimp

Plants:

– an amazon sword somewhere in the back

– hornwort and lots of it !

– some anubias

– valisneria

– some black beard algae

– medium amount of green hair algae

– some other types of green algae on the side and back walls.

I think this hobby should not be a constant headacke. I like the unkept look. I'm doing following maintenance:

– once every 2 weeks or so I pull out handfulls of hornwort with more or less green hair algae.

– once every 3 months or so , I pull out sponges from the filter, squeeze them and maybe rinse them with bottled still water (never using tap water) and sometimes I pull out some of that green hair algae but I don't worry about it too much.

– maybe 2-3 times per year, add some more water (bottled still water) if the level drops.

– never do water changes.

– never do gravel vacuum or anything else inside the aquarium.

Water is very clear especially since adding the hornwort which grew to massive size, sure algae might be too much for some people's taste but as long as it doesn't overwhelm anything … it is what it is.

Also never test water. Fish seem to be happy.