Having a summer job that requires you to clean out garbage rooms can have benefits. Like when someone decides to throw away a perfectly functional aquarium kit, complete with gravel, decorations and a filter pump.

One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.

aquarium kit in the boot of my car

I was left exhausted while working that job which meant the aquarium remained in my car boot for a few days. But after a while I had enough energy to bring everything into my apartment, which , sadly, doesn’t have that much room for activities. But I managed to find a rather nice spot for the aquarium in question, especially since it wasn’t an overly large aquarium.

I took some time to wash all the gravel, as well as the decorations, as well as a quick boil for all of the decorations, driftwood and rocks included. As an attempt to stop unnecessary algae growth while the tank got seasoned. I set it up with some fluval stratum under the gravel, and then began to scape it. I bought three types of plants initially;

initial aquarium setup

This would not be the final layout of the tank, in fact the flat rocks went pretty quickly, but it was a start, and good enough to get the tank started. There was also a light fixture thrown away, and it did seem to be functional, but the power cord lacked the grounding pins so it wouldn’t fit in any outlet I have. And I wanted to set up the lights to be controlled by my HomeAssistant setup anyway, so a LED light strip was the initial lighting for the aquarium, and set to be on from 06:00 til 22:00.