Ha yes Natalia - I can imagine once I've gotten settled into this I'll probably end up with another bigger tank! I eventually would love to have a go at Marine fish too, though I imagine that'll take me a long time to get to that stage! I loved window shopping - very good fun and so many pretty fishes out there! At first the wood shrimp scared me because it was HUGE but eventually it's little eyes won me over haha
Colin - that sounds like a good idea actually! I'll definitely do that! =) Also gives me another excuse to have a browse at their fish again =P I just hope the cute little endlers I saw are a regular thing!
I think Maidenhead must have been restocking after the Christmas / NY period or something as they didn't seem to have much compared to the last time we went - there were a lot of tanks that had covers over because the fish were acclimatising so perhaps in a few weeks time there'll be more stuff to look at!
Ooh I also meant to ask - I read somewhere that shrimps love moss balls and MA had lots of different moss balls which all seemed quite cheap. I thought maybe I could get one of those to keep my eventual shrimp happy - what would I need though to keep a moss ball? They didn't seem to have any base and I saw a MA guy selling one to a customer, he just said that every now and then you needed to give me a bit of a squeeze to get rid of dirt etc (which he was demonstrating). If I got one of those would I need any fertiliser type stuff? Or do they just sort of sit at the bottom?
I'm also thinking of, once I get everything set up of course, making a thread on here to note down all my parameters etc as I think it'd be nice (more for reassurance etc!) to have feedback as I'm going along! I can also post some photos of the progress and how my tank's getting along! Would that be OK or would it be a bit too 'spammy' (just having lots of posts about my water reading etc!)?
RE: the small bits of bogwood I bought - would this need 'pre-soaking' to weigh it down or does it normally sink?
Natalia - great to see your thread on aquascaping! I love photography but I've never been particularly 'arty' in other ways, so I'm hoping the arty-ness from my photography is enough to allow me to make a good job of my tank haha!
(As you can tell I'm a little exciteable!) I just want my boyfriend to set the tank up ASAP so I can get stuck in! I would do it myself but I'm just scared of doing it wrong! I still need to buy something to replace the carbon filter media I have too. I saw lots of things I thought might work but I hadn't written down exactly what I needed from here so I whimped out incase I bought the wrong thing ha.
Oh another thing I considered buying... there's a small filter bit I saw (that was actually cheaper in the shop):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/RC-Hagen-A1387-Fluval-Pre-Filter/dp/B002LL32RY/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1358166618&sr=8-3-fkmr1It says it stops inhabitants being sucked up the filter! Would that be worth investing in since most of my fish are likely to be very small? I don't want to spend so long making the water safe for my fishes, only to have them sucked up to their death!! But I also didn't want to buy something if it's not actually necessary!