Very nice tank you ahve there dataguru.

While I appreciate planted tanks, both my original interest in Cichlids, and the fact that I feed a lot of food [5-7 x a day, live and flake] have made my breeding arrangement mostly bare tank setups; usually with duckweed for cover and lots of loose plastic plants. Gravel is optional, usually, and water changes frequent when breeding [2-3 x per week]. And catsfish. Lots of catfish. Goodeids get more rounded rocks, and other livebearers get 'streambed' looks, or bare.

Gorgeous tank! I actually set up my first Walstad-style tank just yesterday. I see you have had good luck with them. My other tanks have DIY yeast CO2 and Excel dosing. I am really looking forward to not having to fuss with that on this tank. Do you run filters on your tanks?

NPTs are the bomb. Low maintenence. There's not enough hours in the day for me to tinker around constantly with a high tech set up. With these I pull plants as needed, typically monthly, top them off for evaporation and do good-sized water changes 2-3 times a year or when they act like they need one.

here's a better pic of the 125 from 2/2009



Some I do run a powerhead in and some I don't. If I don't have the powerheads running in the 125 NPT, based on critter behavior CO2 gets a bit high at nite and/or O2 gets too low. I have multiple other smaller tanks that appear perfectly happy without water movement happening.

This 20 tall only has a heater and 20 watts of 6500K light. It sits in front of a south window.

I have one tank that I run as almost an NPT. It is a 40 breeder with 110 watts of light on it. The only concession I make to traditional methods is that I run a sponge filter with a power head to circulate the water. It gets about 3 water changes a year and is producing plants in profusion plus producing a nice colony of Xenotaenia resolanae who mostly ignore their fry and let them increase their numbers quickly. There are a couple of odds and ends of other fish in the tank because I was unwilling to break it down to remove all of the sparkling gouramis and ghost shrimp that were keeping the tank fish ready before I got the resolanaes.

I once new a guy who followed that precept, and he only had a 20 gallon tank with Crypts and some Tetras of various species. He fed minimally and only added distilled water to cover evaporation. I couldn't get away with that at all; my feeding loads up the nitrates/nitrites/waste quickly, that's why I change lots of water.
But I do appreciate a nicely planted and managed tank. More power to if you can manage all that.

In my 125, I have 6 big featherfin catfish, a foot long common pleco, a dozen or so corys, couple of skirt tetras, a dojo loach, several bristlenose plecos, 3 angels, couple of wild bettas, and several hundred endlers, not to mention bunches of snails. So it's not lightly stocked by any means. I feed 2 ~1" cubes of homemade gel food twice daily.

The cool thing about a NPTs is that ammonia gets converted mainly to plant mass, not to nitrAte because the plants are doing the filtering instead of biofilter bacteria.

Forgot to mention... my webcam is currently pointed at the 125
http://dataguru.org/misc/aquarium/webcam.html

That looks like a nice part of a river bottom. Looks nice. My tanks come no where close to looking that good, even when I try!