Shrimp Tank Setup in 7 Days! Would it work?

It normally takes me 10 weeks to cycle and fully mature my new shrimp tanks, but when I visited Shrimp's Affair in Singapore, Derek mentioned something really interesting. Our own brand of soil takes around 5-7 days to cycle. 5-7 days? How is it even possible? So of course, I bought this soil from Shrimp's Affair, and I brought it back to the UK to try this method. The first thing, I built a brand new tank for this setup, and it's 40x40x35cm tall, which is quite a good size for Caridina shrimp. Then I prepared UGF box and Shrimp's Affair soil, which comes in 2 packs, and bacterial powder, which I already used in all my setups for a few years with a great result. I followed Derek's instructions and I added just a little bit of soil to cover the bottom of the UGF from pack 2, then I filled this UGF box almost right to the top with the soil from pack 1, and then again I added a little bit of soil from pack 2 to the top of the UGF. I also added a small amount of soil to the bottom of the tank, and I sprinkled few grams of bacterial powder on top of the soil. Then I placed this tank on top of the little cabinet, and I filled this tank with RO water. Okay, we filled this tank with the water, and we managed to do it very gently without disturbing the bacterial powder, so you can see, most of the bacterial powder stay on the soil. I already plugged this tank to the Autobot system, and I also connected the light. The light is currently on timer for 10 hours a day. I also plugged this UGF filter to my air pump system, so now I can switch it on and start cycling this tank. All right, the pump is on, and now I need just to make sure that we lifted this outtake slightly above the water like so, and now we can just start cycling the tank. You can see the water becomes a bit cloudy once we switch on the filter. I still cannot believe we can add shims in one week. I hope they're going to be fine, so we're going to find out in one week. So see you then. One week just passed like that very quickly. I haven't even noticed that. That means today we're adding shims here in this tank. Guys, can you believe that? Doesn't look mature. I hope the shim is going to be all right. We're going to find out in a few seconds. Maybe they're going to die. You never know. It's going to be a failed video. Anyway, before we add in shims, we're going to do a massive water change. Before that, let me just quickly show you the tank. So this is our tank after one week. You can see the water became a little bit cloudy. Not sure if it's normal or not, but the good news, we have some biofilm started to grow on top of this soil. You can see it over there. For reference, I'm going to show you another tank, which is over here, and this tank is only two days younger than this tank. So this tank is five days old, so almost a week as well, and you can see the water here is crystal clear, and this is what I like about this tank. So I think it's supposed to be like this, but I'm not sure. Maybe I put too much bacterial powder, or maybe I've disturbed bacterial powder when I put the water inside the tank. So this tank is going to be ready in a couple of days, but now let's do the massive water change, like 90% of water and adding shims after that. So let's do it now. I just siphoned about 90% of water. You can see just a little bit left at the bottom. You can see we still have a little bit of ammonia there after one week, but that's normal. This soil is leaching ammonia, but not as much as the Amazonia, and it shouldn't be very long, and a little bit of ammonia is okay in this setup, because we're going to have quite low pH, and in low pH, ammonia is not very toxic. So I'm going to use this water dispenser to pump the water back into the tank. Now we just need to press the button like so, and the water starts pumping into the tank very nice and quick. I almost finished pumping the water back into this tank, and guys, I noticed something. Can you see that little coffee pot with my finger? Oh my god. We already have little bugs here. This is the tank where we're going to get our shrimps from, and they are my yellow galaxy shrimp. Take a look at them here. So this tank is a little bit cloudy. You can see it's because we have a lot of soil powder already accumulated at the bottom of UGF, and this tank is not doing fantastic anymore. It used to doing great, and this is because due to tank age. So this tank is about one year old already. Even more than that, maybe one year, two months. So it's time to reset, and we can see the two main signs when it's ready to reset is like a cloudy water due to soil powder, too much soil powder at the bottom of UGF, and the second sign, of course, is breeding activity. So your shrimps stop breeding. So this is the two main signs that we need to reset this tank. So these shrimps are looking for new home, and we have a brand new home over there. So we're going to give it to them now. So guys, you need to remember this setup. We cannot put a lot of shrimps in one go. We have to put little by little every week. So now we're going to start with the 10 shrimps, and then we're going to move 10 more shrimps every week until we move all the shrimps from this tank. Our shrimps are ready. We just finished drip acclimating them. They're all in this jack, so we're ready to put them in. I also put the moss. In a month or so, it's going to be beautiful flame moss on top of UGF. So enough talking. Let's put the shrimps inside the tank. Our shrimps inside this brand new tank, which is only one week old. So let's take a look at them and see how they're doing. I don't see any signs of stress. Just enjoying this bacterial powder, bifilm. Yeah, you see that one on top of the hill? He's just consuming this yummy bifilm. Now I'm going to observe the shrimps for another week. See how they're doing. It's been just over one week since we put the shrimps in this tank, and I'm afraid they all died. I'm joking. They're all doing fantastic. Let me show you the tank. Here you go. This is our tank. It's just over two weeks old. The shrimps are doing fantastic. You can see them on the soil over here. And a lot of them on top of the UGF box as well. This tank has started to develop green walls and you can see some green spots on the glass, even like on the front glass. Probably in a week or so, we're going to see a green wall here, which is very good for baby shrimp, very good for shrimp. I just checked the water parameters in this tank and you can see we have quite a lot of ammonia here. We have zero nitrite and zero nitrate. That's telling us that we don't have much of the nutrifying bacteria to convert ammonia to nitrite and to nitrate. So this tank is not established yet, but the shrimps are doing fine. By the way, let's check the pH and see what we have. Okay, I just calibrated this pen a few days ago and you can see our pH here is 5.4. This is insane. This is very good pH guys. I'm very happy about this. And what is good about this setup is because it's nice and open and there's no way for shrimp to hide from you. And if any shrimp die, you can spot it straight away. Actually, there is one place for them to hide, which is really don't like is behind this UGF box. You can see some shrimp there. And the reason for that because I cannot push this UGF box all the way to the back because of the silicone at the bottom, but I have a very good solution for that. I just got this little piece of glass, slightly smaller than UGF box. And if we place UGF box on top of this glass, it gives us a little space for silicone. Let me show you what I mean. Yeah, that's much better now. After we put this UGF box on top of the piece of glass, it's allow us now to push this box towards the back glass without any gap because we can step over the silicone at the bottom. Nice, I like this. So now it's time to change the water. And here we have a next batch of shrimp, about 12 yellow galaxy shrimps here in this jug. So let's put them inside this tank. Come down, shrimps. It's gonna be a new home for you. All right, we just double amount of shrimps in this tank. And now we have around 25 of yellow galaxy shrimps here. And take a look at them. They like to graze on the soil because they have a lot of biofilm available here. So really pleased with this tank. We have a quite high ammonia reading, but we still have a healthy shrimps and they're very active. And they don't mind this ammonia. I never know about this. And I always wait for ammonia to go away before adding shrimps. So I'm gonna monitor this tank for another week. I'm gonna check on shrimps daily just to see if any problems here. And then after one week, as usual, we're gonna add some more shrimps here. Wow, take a look at this green walls here. This tank is only 12 days old. This tank is already looks like a fully matured. And take a look at this biofilm growing in the bacterial powder here on the top of the soil. And look a little bit green now because green everywhere here. So I'm so happy with that. I just did a massive water change few days ago. Major ammonia is a little bit ammonia here. So this tank is ready for shrimp. And here I have a mix of red and blue balls in this jug. And they're ready to go into this tank. So let's put them in. Our first bunch of shrimps are inside this tank. And they are straight away start to enjoying this yummy biofilm. You can see the red ball female here. So I put here a mix of males and females. So hopefully they can breed straight away. So we're gonna find out in a week or so. And we don't need to feed the shrimps for weeks and weeks. They have plenty of available food here. So I'm gonna leave the shrimps alone for a week. And then we're gonna get back to this tank and add some more shrimps and see how the shrimps doing. Another week just passed. That's mean we're adding more shrimps today into our new tanks, into this tank and into this tank. But first, let's see how the tank developing. Let's see how they're doing. All right, this is our tank with the yellow galaxy. And you can see this tank is already looking mature. We have a very good amount of green algae growing on the walls. And not only on the walls, also on the floor at the bottom of the tank. And you can see that she managed to distribute the soil over the bottom of the tank. If you remember, we used to have a hill here with some material powder and we grew some biofilm on top. So the shrimps managed to consume most part of the biofilm. And now the soil is almost flat at the bottom of the tank. And guys, that's mean that our shrimp run out of food and they're ready to be fed. And once I add more shrimps into this tank, we can feed them finally. You can see on top of the UGL, we have our moss. It started to grow already. I guess I almost forgot to test ammonia in this tank. So let's do it now. All right, this is our test result. And you can see we still have a little bit of ammonia in this tank. We have a zero nitrite and a little bit of nitrate. It was a tiny bit amount of nitrate. So that's mean the neutrophil bacteria start to grow in this tank. So let's do the water change and then we can add more shrimp. All right, I just changed almost 50% of water in this tank. And guys, don't forget to add a little bit of bacterial powder every time you do the water change. Just sprinkle a little bit of bacterial powder on top of the water. And the main purpose of this bacterial powder is to growing the green walls inside your tank. So think about this as a fertilizers for your dust algae. This is my old tank with yellow galaxy shrimp. And this tank is not doing great. For some reason, they start to die here in this tank. And I already lost three shrimp this week. This is a good time to move all the shrimps into our new setup. Otherwise, we might lose even more shrimp. All right, the shrimps are all here in this jug. And it's over 50 of them, including these tiny little babies. I didn't expect so many little babies. It's probably about 25 of the tiny, tiny little ones. You can see them over there. And tomorrow, guys, I'm going to break this tank down. I'm going to do a completely new setup. I'm going to do a video about that. So if you don't want to miss it, subscribe to my channel. So now let's move the shrimps into our new setup. Here you go. We moved all the yellow galaxy shrimps into this tank. And take a look at them, guys. Lots of shrimps here, including tiny little babies, which we have plenty in this tank. Lots of the shrimps prefer to chill on top of a UGF and hide inside the moss. So very pleased with this setup. So now it's time to check this tank out with our blue ball shrimps. Let's see how it's doing. And look at this tank, guys. Now we have insane amount of green dust algae growing on the surface of the tank. We have a very happy shrimp inside. And you can see they almost flatten this soil over the bottom of the tank. And take a look at the amount of poop they produce within one week, guys. That's insane. In this kind of setup with almost bare bottom, with minimal soil, you really can see how much feces the shrimp make. That's insane, guys. This is 10 shrimps in one week. So we have to vacuum it out. So this is good about this setup because you can just easily siphon this poop every week when you do the water change. I forgot to mention, I just tested ammonia in this tank and we have a little bit ammonia left. Same result as we have in this tank. Okay, our tank is look much better now. You can see we vacuum all the poop. We changed the water. We added a little bit bacterial powder. So now it's time to add some shrimp. And here we have more blue balls and couple red balls in this little jug. They've all been selected for this tank. So let's put them in. This tank definitely looks better with more shrimps inside. So here we have roughly about 25 of red and blue balls in this tank. And hopefully in my next update, we're going to see some breeding activity. We're going to see some buried shrimps. So I'll see you in a week or so with another update. In one week after I added the last bunch of shrimp I ran into an issue. The water in the tank became green. Indicated that we have an algae bloom. I had this issue before in my cycling tanks and normally I use some chemicals to quickly get rid of that. But obviously here we can't use it because we have shrimp in this tank. So this time I decided to buy a filter with UV sterilizer as many of you guys suggested to fight this green water. I covered the intake with a mesh bag to avoid the shrimp to suck into the filter. I also added a sponge on the outtake for the more gentle floor. Then I did a major water change to remove as much of the green water as possible out of the tank. And I placed the filter inside the tank. After a few days, the green in the water had gone away but the water remained cloudy and it took forever for this cloudiness to go away. But finally in about 2-3 weeks, the water become clear again. I didn't have any issues with the other tank. This tank has always been doing fantastic. Haven't seen any dead shrimp. It has very healthy green walls same in another tank, low pH and very active shrimp. So both tanks cycled at the end of week 5. This is when the water parameters became normal and ammonia finally went away. It's been 8 weeks since we set these tanks up. The tank is doing great and I'm very pleased with the end result. So now it's time to do the final update and show you the tanks. This is the tank with the yellow galaxy shrimp and you can see the water is clear now and the shrimp are doing great. I even found a few buried shrimp in this tank. This is very good news. They finally started to breed here. I'm not gonna lie, I lost some of the shrimps during the cycle and it's totally my fault. I shouldn't have overstocked this tank when it's still being cycled and I shouldn't use such a sensitive shrimp for this method. These yellow galaxy are really pain to breed and it took me a year to finally breed some numbers. But now the tank is fully cycled and stable and I can see the shrimps are active and happy. So hopefully we're gonna see lots of babies here very soon. And this is another tank with the blue balls. I didn't have any problems and I didn't lose any shrimp here mainly because I didn't overstock it. They have always been doing great and they already started to breed here as well. I have three buried females here so far. The shrimp are happy and we have plenty of dust algae on the walls, same as another tank. Our shrimp always have something to eat. They're not really excited when I feed them. They prefer natural food, the algae and biofilm. So very pleased with this result in general. So now let me quickly share my experience with this method and the products that we use for this setup. I like this oil from Shrimp's Affair. I'm not gonna lie, it has quite a low pH at about 5.5 which is similar to area Amazonia but it doesn't leach ammonia for very long which is good because you basically can cycle your tank much quicker. This bacterial powder is awesome for growing these dust algae, these green walls in your tank and this is the main food source for your baby shrimp and I've used this bacterial powder for about three years now with a great result in normal tanks that have green walls and it increases the baby survival rate by a lot. Now let's quickly talk about this method of setting up the tank. Obviously it is not magic here. We're just adding shrimp early into not yet cycled tank with some ammonia but because we have low pH, ammonia is less toxic in the water with low pH and our shrimp survive this. Basically it's very similar when you use fish in the tank to cycle it but instead of fish we're just using shrimp. Would I use this method again? Yes, definitely. I like the end result, the tank developed nice and clean, healthy algae on the walls. Normally when I cycle my tanks without shrimps I have all sort of bad algae growing during the cycle like a hair algae, cotton algae, even beard algae sometimes. So at the end of the cycle you have to clean this algae and sometime it's returning in the future which is not ideal. With the shrimps inside the tank they kind of controlling this algae and it's only good dust algae growing which you want to see in the tank and there's no bad algae at all and at the end the tank is very nice and clean which I really like. Next time of course I'm going to be extra careful with this method. Our ecosystem is still not developed yet and it's very easy to crash. If you overfeed, overdose bacterial powder or overstock your tank like in my case you might run into the issues like green water, bacterial bloom, like your shrimp might die so it's better to be extra careful. I'm not going to use expensive shrimp next time. I'm going to use like a cheap shrimp like my coals or my crystal shrimps something like which I don't care too much. Actually by the way I already replaced this blue ball in that tank which we use for cycling this tank for more expensive shrimp and they are doing fantastic. They already start to breed but more about that in my next video. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.