New Tank, And What Goes In It

an oto cat.

Please don't get just one oto. They are shoaling fish which need company of their own kind. If you want an algae eater, get a nerite snail. They are fine as just one as eat more algae than otos.

What do you mean by a small group of barbs - I hope you mean at least 6 of them.


As for GH, your water company (or the testing company they use) has much better testing equipment that we can get for home use. My son used to work as an analyst for Severn Trent Laboratories and was highly amused by our testing kits.

A silent cycle is when plants alone are used to cycle the tank - it can be done but, from the limited reading I've done on it, think it takes about 9 months. I'm assuming/hoping that SoraStar meant that she'd be doing a combination of the more accurate method of using ammonia in conjunction with the plants method which might reduce the fishless cycle length a little eg from 6 weeks to 5 weeks, for example.

The fishless cycle seems a heck of a lot easier and less work.

Hi Sora, good to hear an update.

Less than ten days seems an almost unprecedented length of time for a tank - or, more accurately, the filter) to fully cycle. What test kit have you been using and what were your daily readings? Did you add ammonia or fish food to simulate the fish's waste and get the nitrogen cycle going, or did you just leave the tank as it was with the plants? The reason I'm asking is that occasionally some people have thought that by leaving the tank sitting was "cycling" it and, because the ammonia/nitrate/nitrite readings all looked to be at appropriate levels, they assumed it was cycled.

As it seems more likely that you're still in the process of actually undergoing the cycle, through a silent/fish-in cycle, you'll need to keep a very close eye on your ammonia/nitrate/nitrite readings daily, monitoring them, and doing frequent water changes to ensure that ammonia and nitrite are kept down at 0, and nitrate as close to 20ppm as possible.

We can and will be happy to advise more appropriately (eg on when would be the best stage to add the small school of male guppies), once we know what process you've gone through over the past ten days or so.

Hope the fish you've got so far are settling in well.

Those results look fine.

It is good practice to monitor the levels for a few days every time you add new fish. That way you catch it early if the filter can't cope.