Help Needed

[The Avenging Narwhal]

Here's the scenario. I bought a 380l aquarium (£67 off eBay!) and currently have all my fish in my 60l tank. This 380l aquarium is filtered by a Fluval Fx5, which is ideal for 1500l of water. The 380l tank is medium-planted and has been running now for a week, four days of which now it's had 8 tetras in it. Would it be safe from a biological standpoint to transfer my upside-down catfish and rainbow shark too? I know that new aquarium filters are susceptible to being easily overloaded biologically, but it's 380 litres with an Fx5 and would have ten small fish in it overall. Is that safe, or should I leave it another week or so?

 

[slakey]

I would leave it at least another week.

Also try adding some of the water from the 60L tank over to the 380L tank when you do water changes, it won't help out massively, but every little counts


Oh and don't forget to use Seachem Stability and Seachem Prime (Y)

 

[kevinjames]

I would leave it at least another week.

Also try adding some of the water from the 60L tank over to the 380L tank when you do water changes, it won't help out massively, but every little counts


Oh and don't forget to use Seachem Stability and Seachem Prime (Y)

transfering the water will do nearly nothing.
keep testing the water till readings become more stable. did u put any mature media in the fx5?

 

[The Avenging Narwhal]

Sadly no, it was new media.

 

[N0body Of The Goat]

Can you not simply either put the 60l tank's filter in the new tank for one month or so, or place the media from the 60l tank's filter into several baskets of the FX5?

If you can do either, you should be safe to move everything across to the big tank from a bacterial point of view. Even better if you can run both filters in teh new tank and transfer some media into the FX5. Whether all fish are compatable is different matter altogether.

 

[The Avenging Narwhal]

That's a brilliant idea, I never thought that through in hindsight. It did cross my mind to put the 60l tank's filter into the big tank but for whatever reason I thought to myself that it'd be insufficient, but since the number of fish is staying the same it'll be fine! I'll get on that right now, and get all the fish transferred over. Regarding compatability, there have been no problems so far; it seems to be a fairly peacable shark which spends most of its time foraging around the substrate.