40 Litre Aquarium Stocking Advice

What are the dimensions of your tank? White clouds may be small but they are quite active and like a tank at least 60cm long. If yours is one of the more cubic tanks, they wouldn't be suitable I'm afraid.
However, if it is longer rather than a cube the white clouds will be fine.

To be honest, having has these fish in the past, there won't be much uneaten food. What they don't catch mid-water they will eat off the bottom. Fish don't read books, white clouds don't know they are supposed to be  mid-water feeders  . Fish will eat from wherever they can find food. But shrimps will make a nice addition to a tank, they add very little to the bioload. The problem will be finding ones that have the same temperature requirements as the fish. The yellow shrimp you've seen are probably a colour variation of red cherry shrimp, and they need a temp of 22 to 29 deg C, so wouldn't go with white clouds, I'm afraid. Have a look here; browse the shrimp species to see which species would be OK at lower temps.
When there are shrimps in the tank, you need places for them to hide when they moult. Things like bushy plants, real or fake. They shed their skins to grow and are very vulnerable to being eaten while the new skin hardens.


If your tank is cubic so that you need smaller fish, or you decide to keep warmer water fish so you can have shrimps, there are plenty of species to choose from.
Soft water -
Boraras species eg chili rasbora, sparrow rasbora
Microdevario kubotai
Ember tetras
Sundadanio axelrodi

Hard water -
Endlers (male only or the tank will be overpopulated very quickly)
Danio erythromicron

You'll find all these fish in the database on Seriously Fish.



Is this your first tank? You will need to cycle it before getting fish, and particularly before getting shrimp as they are more sensitive than fish. The way to cycle it is here

Does it have any fish in it at the moment? From your first post I had the impression it had no fish in and you were intending to get some white clouds  Might just be me misinterpretting 

If it has fish in now, that's fine, get shrimps as soon as you find a species that can cope with the temps the white clouds like.
But if there are no fish in the tank, it won't be cycled regardless of how long it has been running. Since it is planted, they will take care of some of the ammonia made by any new fish but you can't know if they will remove all of it. The best thing is to add a dose of ammonia, enough to get a reading of 3ppm, then test after 24 hours. If the ammonia reading has dropped to zero, you do have enough plants; if not you need to complete a fishless cycle. Even if one or both filters was cycled, after a few weeks without fish (if this is the case) the bacteria will have gone dormant and after that length of time it will take them several days to wake up.

Water treatments won't make the water OK for fish.
A dechlorinator just removes chlorine and usually heavy metals; chlorine kills bacteria and irritates fish so that needs to be removed and heavy metals such as copper can kill shrimps so those too need to be removed.
If you used a bacterial supplement, unless it was Dr Tim's One & Only or Tetra Safe Start, that will have done nothing to the tank as they contain the wrong species of nitrite eating bacteria. The two I mentioned do contain the correct species but Dr Tim's in hard to get in the UK and TSS doesn't always work as it is often damaged by incorrect handling between the factory and your tank.
A tank that is safe for fish has two colonies of bacteria in the filter. Even if you used Dr Tim's, without fish to feed the new colonies they will go dormant. If you did manage to find a bacterial supplement that actually worked, you could only prove it by adding ammonia to check.
What exactly do you mean by filter aid? If you have used this all it does is clump together floating bits in the water; it doesn't make the tank safe for fish.


As for white clouds, 47cm is a bit on the short side. Do you desperately want these fish are are you open to changing your stocking short list? Other, smaller, warmer water fish would be more suitable and would leave you bigger options when it comes to things like shrimps.
You don't actually need bottom feeders. They still need to be fed, they don't just live on left overs. Cleaning the bottom of the tank is the fishkeeper's job. Bottom feeders can be an attractive addition to a tank, you should get them because you want something that lives on the bottom, not as a clean up fish/shrimp etc.

If you do really want white clouds, I would keep them alone. There are very few temperate fish for sale and fish like zebra danios need tanks at least a metre long despite their size. White clouds do come in two colours, grey and yellow (gold white clouds) so if you wanted some variety you could get a mixture.
The 10 to 12 fish you originally suggested would put you right at the tank's limit to overstocked (100% for 10, 120% for 12). I would stick with 8 maximum for a tank this size.

To be honest, they will have done virtually nothing to make the tank safe for fish.

Safe Guard is a dechlorinator which has an additive to detoxify ammonia. It is intended for areas that have chloramine in the water supply rather than chlorine. Chloramine is a chlorine and an ammonia joined together. Most dechlorinators split them up and some, like Safe Guard, have something to detoxify this ammonia for up to 24 hours until the filter bacteria can remove it. It is not intended to remove the ammonia made by the fish in an uncycled tank. It also contains aloe vera 'to stimulate the fish's slime coat'.

Reading up on Safe Water, it is a bit ambiguous.

Safe Water oxidises ammonia & nitrite into nitrate - a relatively harmless substance that can be absorbed by plants as foods & is easily removed by regular partial water changes.

Does this mean it uses chemicals to do this or does it mean it is a bacteria product?
If it's chemical, that ties you into using it forever. If you remove the ammoia by chemical means you'll never grow enough bacteria to cope alone so you can never stop using the product.
If it's a bacterial product, it won't do much to help as it contains the wrong species of nitrite eating bacteria - those products I mentioned a few posts back have copyrighted or registered the use of the correct one so no-one else can use it.

JBL filter starter - another bacterial product which again is unlikely to work for the reasons given above.

The plant food will be fine for the plants but do nothing for the fish.


Basically, you have an uncycled tank. If you get fish you will most likely find yourself doing a fish-in cycle; the plants may help you keep it under control but you'll still find yourself needing to do a lot of water changes. Since you have another tank, the simplest thing to do is steal a bit of media from the other tank's filter, put it in the new tank's filter and add ammonia, following the fishless cycling instructions on here. The mature media will help seed the cycle, the plants will be using some ammonia as food so you won't need to grow as many bacteria as without plants, and you never know the king british and jbl products might help.