Right, I have been having a change around in my lounge with what tank goes where, including selling two and getting one bigger one. Anyway, with all the movement and the Malawi fish having to be taken out anyway, i thought it would be an ideal time to re-organise the tank.

I also moved on a few non Mbuna and replaced with some Mbuna juveniles. The set-up is going to be a lot more Mbuna dominated. 80% of the fish in the new set-up are Mbuna.

Once i work out how to post some pictures (hopefully in next 5 minutes) i am going to remind people of what it looked like before, and by the time this thread is finished in a few days, you will see the new look.

okay lets see if this works, these pictures are the tank how it traditionally looked ever since i set it up. I experimented with the odd plant here or there as i liked the contrast the green provided to the set-up

Going to use photo-bucket, some of my Pictures are over the 95kb limit for JPEG

The tank is 48" length, 20" depth and 24" high (22" water level) and it holds about 300 litres.

when i took out all the rocks recently to re-home some fish (catch them), i put all the lava rock and ocean rock back in a rush, and it got me thinking about mixing up the lava rock and ocean rock more.

this is what the tank looked like for a few weeks, i am not going to have it quite like this, but it did get me thinking.

The tank had just been ripped apart, hence the scrappy look!

Looks much better with the rocks mixed up mate, i recently put some java fern in with my cichlids and the color it provides makes it much more interesting to look at. and the cichlids have a new football to play with! good ol moss balls.

Love that last picture - you will be getting me back into malawis at this rate.
How do you keep the algae from growing all over the rocks? Mine never looked as clean as yours.

Apart from the ocean and lava rock, i have also got hold of some blue granite (thanks telboy) and some slate which i have broken into small pieces, i am not sure if i am going to add any of this rock/slate at the moment.

Here is a picture of the tank right now, i am going to try and have all the water, sand and rocks in tonight and add the fish and mature filters back to the tank tomorrow.

you've got me thinking mate, i got about 30 healthy moss balls in my community tank, i might nick some for the Malawi

yep, we'll have you back to Malawi soon enough!

well, as for the ocean rock and algae

1. Lighting, max is about 6 hrs a day for me and i have made sure its no where near a window. Also, somedays the lights are on for only 3-4 hours and also generally one day a week they are not on at all.

2. I did bleach my ocean rock once, that was because they were just brown, i dont mind green, but they were brown! I think you could bleach them every 3-months or so and keep lighting down and it would be ok.

3. Water quality, i think really doing loads of water changes helps too.

my biggest x2 bits of ocean rock have entered the fray now!!!