New Fishkeeper, Stocking Help

But don't get too hung up on "hard water fish". There are plenty of the more popular fish that will do perfectly well in a wide range of water conditions. That's one reason why they are popular!

If you have hard water it means that you should NOT have specifically soft water demanding fish, which is different from saying that you can ONLY have hard water specific fish. Look at the profiles on this site for any fish you fancy.

So much great advise on here, I really appreciate it!

So the tank is setup now and filled it up last night so I'm starting the fishless cycle. I will post up pictures tonight as I know you lot like pictures. I must say that the Python I bough for filling the tank is amazing! What a great piece of kit!

On the Plant front, I am choosing for synthetic plants. I'm really not a fan of the real ones and I don't want something else to look after.

On the fish front I have decided I'm getting way too ahead of myself, I'm now considering just starting with Rainbow fish, baby Angel fish and Tetras. The reason for the baby angel fish is I'm hoping they grow up with the tetras and don't try and eat them. Finally a L200 or queen arabesques Plec to help out with cleaning.

I know Angelfish are suited to Soft Water but I have ready many articles with people happily keeping Angels in Hard water so I'm going to give it a try.

I'm planning on mixing Angelfish and Rainbow fish specifies to get a lot of colours in the tank!

@Colin - Great article, brilliant read...thank you!

Thanks sue, I have left the lights off for now.

I haven't bought the plats yet and I'm glad I haven't, thank you for the advise about getting silk ones.

Do you have an example of Deep bodied tetras? Like the diamond ones?

As for the silk plants, mine are all silk too, mainly from Aqua One, AquaManta, Hugo Kamishi, and BiOrb. The ones with the ball-shaped, weighted base are particularly good as they don't topple over whereas sometimes the other ones can topple over if the substrate isn't carefully built up around the base to cover them.

If buying online, read the description and look at the picture carefully - there are a few plants advertised as silk but actually only the leaves are silk whereas the stems (which can sometimes be the bulk of the plant) are plastic. If the description says "silk leaves" rather than just "silk", then that's usually a sign that the remainder of the plant isn't silk.

In my opinion you need to do a water change to get the ammonia down to 3 ppm. 10 ppm is just too much.

1 ppm ammonia makes 2.7 ppm nitrite, so that 10 ppm will make 27 ppm nitrite. At 15 ppm, nitrite inhibits the growth of the nitrite eating bacteria so the cycle stalls. Since no test kits can measure as high as 15 ppm (they just show the highest colour on the chart) you won't know if your nitrite has passed the critical level.
The method written up on here was designed so that nitrite could never get to that figure if followed strictly.

You need to do a 70% water change.


Look on it as good practice for when you have fish 





Oh, and Nutrafin (or Fluval or whatever it's called now) Cycle isn't very highly regarded. Even if it worked it would still need a source of ammonia. It might help with growing the ammonia eaters but it is one of those that is reckoned not to do anything for the nitrite eaters.

This product used to be called Nutrafin Cycle, but Nutrafin and Fluval are both made by Hagen so it's probably the same stuff.

I still maintain the spreadsheets I started on all 3 tanks. They are an invaluable source of data, particularly if you have a problem ..... or, e.g. "how long have I had that fish". Although, I have to say mine have really now become diaries rather than spreadsheets. I find that if I don't record, e.g., when I did a w/c, it's easy to miss one if you're busy. There is no substitute for the facts!

                                                      Skittler

What I have just realized when writing this is that I didn't treat the water I just put in.  so when I get home tonight I need to do that first thing or have I just killed off any (if any) work that has already been done?

If you mean you forgot to add dechlorinator, no problem. The few bacteria in your tap water will still be there and multiplying then once the dechlorinator is added the newly formed bacteria won't be killed off before they can divide in turn to make more. The danger time is with newly forming bacteria colonies. Yours won't have got started properly yet.

Are your input and output pipes next to each other? I think they need to be at opposite ends of the tank, I could be wrong though 

edited to add: I think the tank looks lovely however your corals may well get covered with brown algae as you've just started cycling the tank and they'd be impossible to get clean unless they're resin

Lovely tank.

[I'm assuming that's a timer beside the plug. If so, that's absolutely fine, but if it happened to be one of the plug-in perfumes (which i don't think it is but just double-checking), then best to remove it as it can cause all sorts of problems if near a fishtank.]