Equipment

After 58 days of cycling, waiting, and watching green water bloom, we finally added fish to the tank. Just not the ones we planned.

A look at the full infrastructure behind this blog: Mac Mini server, Docker, AI image moderation, cloud storage, and AI-assisted writing.

This was our worst day yet. Major plant losses, oxygen problems, and emergency trips to the fish store.

We added a Tapo C120 camera to document the tank’s progress. Timed to sync with the aquarium lights.

The plants arrived. The soil was ready. Four hours of careful layering, planting, and water-adding transformed an empty tank into the beginning of an ecosystem.

It started with a simple question: What if we set up an aquarium? What followed was weeks of research into the Walstad method.