Nicola Marchi wrote:I myself have an aquarium with only a timed light. Unfortunately I had to give away my fish, it became a shrimp only aquarium, when I left the country for a month, but the aquarium did fine by itself.
You really should go with a fully planted aquarium. When I still had half a dozen fish and a dozen shrimp, my 30 gallon tall planted aquarium could easily oxygenate the water enough. Note: I planned on not using a pump for oxygenation and thus chose a few small hardy species that I introduced only after cycling the tank with the ammonia method.
Don't ever introduce fish to a planted aquarium without having cycled it and the plants themselves have started to grow again after having first introduced it, otherwise you'll be doing many water changes just to keep up (even when my aquarium was fully populated I only did a water change a month and my water quality was fantastic)
There's a really good book that can help you out called "Ecology of the Planted Aquarium" by Diana L Walstad if you do decide to try out a fully planted aquarium.
Check out "http://www.plantedtank.net/forums/" to see what people are doing with a planted aquarium.
Thank you for sharing this idea I also thought a lot about it
