Hi All,

Okay, so I'm planning my first vivarium and I've done a pretty fair amount of reading, but I still have a few questions. I have a tank, I forget the dimensions, but it's more vertical than horizontal and it isn't enormous. I'm planning on having a water feature and hopefully some sort of amphibian once I get things established.

The first thing i'm a little confused about is this false-bottom plan that I saw on http://home.earthlink.net/~kenuy/pEQUIPMENT4.htm . I don't understand why you would want to have the water that drains from you plants going into the same body of water that your animals use for drinking. I understand that the water can often have good nutrients in it for plants, but if the water isn't going back into the soil, what good is it? It seems like the water supply would just get really brown and gross. I was wondering what your opinion on the best water system is. Keeping in mind that I plan to keep things fairly simple (I'm not drilling any holes in the tank.) I know I'll need some sort of filtration system, but I'm not sure what kind to get. I know some people need very little filtration, but others have worse luck with algae due to all the chemical balances and all - so I'm trying to avoid a sloppy, greenish brown mess. At the same time I'm not going to spend $100 dollars on a UV filter right off the bat heh heh.

My other question that sort of follows the first one is about cleaning up after the animals. In the past I have had whites tree frogs and a salamander in traditional setups with all the fake green stuff. I constantly had to clean feces out of the water bowl. I also weekly had to clean out the entire tank because it would begin to smell bad from dead crickets that would always get stuck in nooks and crannies and of course, mainly because of stinky animal waste. I know that this is all suppose to be taken care of in vivariums with the natural balance of plants and all. Despite that, there are sooooo many places in vivariums for crickets or other bugs to get stuck and die and for frogs to poop that it seems like the vivarium would just turn into a big smelly mess after some time. How do I properly make sure this doesnt happen since I can't just wash out the whole vivarium tank weekly?

Thank you!

Dan