I've decided to make an indoor mini pond in my kitchen from things I'm going to re-use that were otherwise going to be chucked away.
The pond will have quite a few house plants growing from it such as:
Pothos
Peace Lily
Lucky Bamboo
Possibly Anthurium
Some mini floating Water Lily's
ZZ Plant
I also would like to create an eco system within the water, I'll be adding some water snails and dwarf fresh water shrimp plus water beetles and water lice etc that will live of the algae and plant waste.
I have most things. I have the tank and a wooden box to make it look more like an indoor pond rather than just a fish tank in the kitchen. The tank is slightly too large for the wooden box so I will need to modify the wooden box to make it fit. Some of you may remember seeing this same wooden box in another thread of mine that I was going to use for my indoor planter for my livingroom but it didn't really go well with the theme I have in there so I will make a new box for that planter and use this one for my mini pond instead.
I have an antique light fitting that I've rewired and tested and a vacuum cord which I've cut to the length I need.
I always find vacuum cords very useful as I do a lot of electrical work so its always useful have plenty of wire. Many get thrown away so when I see them dumped I salvage the cords.
Time to break out the soldering iron and get the wires tinned before I connect them into a junction block. I find its much better to tin the ends of wires before clamping them down into a connector. I was going to use solder and heatshrink without the connector but I'm out of heatshrink so a junction block will have to do. Now because the light fitting is metal I should really have it earthed but I only had two core cable so I will just use that. This cord came from a vacuum cleaner with the plug, vacuum cleaners use 13 amp fuses so I will replace the fuse with a 3 amp as its now going to be powering the light fitting.
I will be using 7watt L.E.D 6500k color temperature bulbs with the defuser caps removed, from just one of these bulbs I can measure close to 4000 LUX at 1 foot although these light meter apps are never 100% accurate its good enough as a tool to get a rough idea of the light brightness. I've have chosen low light tolerant plants for this project and from my research, most of these plants mentioned above can do well in 1000 lux which is considered medium light.
The tank and wooden box
The light fitting
