Thank you! I would so love to have a 150 and a 300, and building one, that sounds so awesome!
They actually sell minnows as bait fish at the local petsmart, untreated for diseases... I was thinking of getting some 20 or so and treating/quarantining them myself in the 10 gallon for a while, before introducing them to my current 90 gallon population. I don't really have the energy to stick through an auction, I gotta keep my time out to short times of action because I wear out very quickly nowadays. I do love the assortment I have now, but if I had a larger as I said I would so love having full size pleco and a few other local specie like bluegill and maybe a channel cat.
The water here is pretty hard but pretty clean, and I treat it with anti chlorine/chloramine every time I add water. The lamp right now is a 23 watt sylvania fluorescent I forgot the color temp on.
I used to be a qualified electrician in my early post-highschool days (yes a girl electrician xD ) and I am somewhat of a maker/builder so I am going to put my own LED strips inside this light shell or make my own light shell with LED strips. I may even go the full RGB LED with controller route so I can control the color temperature and brightness and set up a full day to night cycle with them. Fancy, eh?
I just got one more betta female, a very small white with lemon colored fins... and got some more tall plastic plants, so I will be ok for now, but I do want to plant and grow fish eventually. Maybe after the light is made.
Sometimes you can find some interesting fish at bait stores and aquarium store feeder tanks. Small sunfish, topminnows, sometimes something very colorful such as dace or red shiners or other colorful minnows. Then there are species that aren't colorful like the fatheads (except for the xanthic form used for aquarium feeders) but which are still interesting because they exhibit interesting behavior such as protection and raising of the young, something not found in minnows except for
Pimophales. With respect to bluegills, I'm not sure you want them. A mature (8"+) male bluegill in breeding coloration is an incredible fish, but also an ornery fish that needs a lot of water and can be very hard of females. They also grow to two to five pounds depending on population, space, and food. Centrarchidae in general can be problematic legally as well; I'm not sure what California allows you to keep, but Centrarchidae are usually highly regulated because they can decimate waters if introduced. If you can keep sunfish, you may also want to check out longear sunfish (probably the most spectacular species in the family), green sunfish (some populations are incredibly beautiful, although all are highly predaceous), or the dollar sunfish, probably the best aquarium fish of the bunch. Some populations of dollar sunfish are almost as beautiful as longears, but grow only to 5" or so so you can keep more of them. And the females are showier too, not all that colorful but sometimes with a lot of silver spangling.
http://jonahsaquarium.com/JonahSite/fishlist.htm
You may also be able to trade some skilled labor and get some fish or plants from a local breeder or hobbyist, as long as they are willing to work within your physical limitations. Many people would like to have DIY lighting hoods, but simply don't have the technical knowledge to safely do so. An LED lighting setup with good color and variable intensity/spectrum shift throughout the day would be awesome! You could also do much the same thing with linear fluorescent, just buy 0-10V dimming ballasts and build your own controller.