10 Days In, Are My Test Readings To Be Expected For This Length Of Time

Hooray, new fish. 

Platies were my first fish, and I still have 2 females which were the offspring from the original fish.
Mine have a tendency to eat a lot, any type of food, there's no stopping them.   

I hope that yours settle in well, and I'm looking forward to seeing pictures.

I'm sorry to hear about the platy  The fish in the shop have been through a lot - being imported from the breeding farms, placed in the wholesaler's tanks, shipped to the shop, placed in the shop's tanks, chased with a net every time someone buys a fish from that tank, placed in a tiny bag, and finally released into yet another new tank. It is not surprising that some fish are so stressed they can't cope.


Since you did a fishless cycle you can get more straight away. The fish you have won't make enough ammonia to feed all the bacteria you have just grown so if you wait a couple of weeks they'll start to go dormant. But I'd stop at 75% of your planned fish for a few months. If there are any fish on your wish list that need a mature tank, as opposed to a cycled tank, they have to wait a few months anyway.

3 ppm ammonia was chosen for fishless cycling as it is more than a sensibly stocked tankful of fish will make in a day, but is low enough so that nitrite does not go higher than the stall point during cycling.

To be honest, as many fish as will take you up to 75% stocked. It is only cycling with fish that you have to add only a few at a time. With fishless cycling you can get all 75% of your wish list in one go.

What fish have you in mind?

Ahhh.
Mollies and platies need hard water; neon tetras need soft water. I'm afraid they are not compatible.

Looking back through your thread I see that your hardness is 12 dH. This is actually too soft for mollies - they need 15 to 35 dH. Mollies tend to get something called the shimmies if the water is not hard enough.
The top of the range for neons is 12 dH but we should always aim to keep fish where the hardness is in the middle of their range, so neons should be in water where that hardness is around 6 dH.

Bottom feeders are corydoras and loaches, both of which are soft water fish.

Somewhere in the forum is a list of fish suitable for hard water. I'm having trouble finding it at the moment........

Being totally unscientific - unless its biology, all these numbers are, well, just numbers.  The Wessex Water website mentions, apart from calcium.
Degrees Clark (UK) 19.81  Degrees German (dh) 15.85   Degrees French (f) 28.3 and says
"Your water hardness  level is classified as hard"

Get some fish they said. It'll be easy, they just swim around all day and only need feeding   

It's the German degrees you need - 15.85. In fish profiles that's called dH or degrees. It converts to 283 ppm, the other unit used in fish profiles.

All you need to do is look up the fish that you like on Seriously Fish and scroll down to 'Water Conditions'. In that section, every profile gives the temp, pH and hardness that the species needs. Some profiles give the hardness range in dH, others in ppm.
Then compare your 15.8 dH/283 ppm to the range quoted in the profile. If your values are near the middle of that range, that species is OK for your water.

So of the fish you specifically mentioned:
platies - range 10 to 30 dH - your 15.85 dH is fine
mollies - 15 to 35 dH - your 15.85 dH is right on the lower edge
neon tetras - 18 to 215 ppm - your 283 ppm is too hard

Since your water is slightly harder than I realised, you might get away with mollies. These, like platies, need 3 females for every male.
Word of warning - male livebearers will try to mate with anything that swims