i was given a fish tank a few months ago. I recently began to set it up. its 24x20x12 so i believe it is 25 gallons. anyways, i have put freshwater, gravel, rocks and fake plants in it. I also have a heater installed since i plan to use tropical fish. The filter which came with the tank looks to be the bak pak with a rio 600 pump. i also bought a cheap hood with a light and a backround. I was wondering if this was all i needed to begin. Or is their anything else i need to get for my tank.I plan to put neon tetras in it, because i have heard they are great starter fish. My tank has been running for a week with the bak pak. Am i ready for fish or do i need other accesories for my tank?
Dean, Welcome to the forums!
I agree with Adam that Nelly has posted up lots of good info up there for you to read!
Your questions are very good in that you've stopped at the early stage of looking at the equipment you have and thought to question whether there might be others out there who have experience and could help you think about it before you decide you've really got the equipment you want and whether there are things you haven't thought about...
You are really lucky to have stumbled on this particular forum. In the time I've been here I've found it to be fantastic - filled with nice and experienced people who often go out of their way to make it fun to learn a bunch of new, sometimes arcane stuff about this hobby.
You've got a good start here and presumably are starting to read. A good followup would be to start a thread over in "New to the Hobby" to repeat these or ask more questions based on your reading. There are a number of pinned topics at the top of that same "New.." forum and there is a topic, among the various important ones nelly provides above, which is very important and really should not be overlooked by someone new to this -- it is the topic of the Nitrogen Cycle, the thing that is behind the topic of "fishless cycling." In those pinned topics I recommend you go to Beginners Resource Center, Cycling Resource Center and then look for articles by AlienAnna and Miss Wiggle. Read through these as an intro of sorts. Take a look at some of the diagrams over at wikipedia if you want. Then perhaps come back to the main fishless cycling article, which is our working document, by rdd1952.
Don't be put off by all this reading, it is meant to save you a ton of trouble. A raw aquarium with a newly setup filter is really not ready for fish often for many weeks. Putting the fish in there just either creates a lot of trouble for you after you find out you need to do lots and lots of water changes, or else the fish just die or get sick and make you feel bad usually.
Anyway, good luck and hope to see your thread over there at some point,
~~waterdrop~~
/www.fishforums.net/content/Beginner...Heater-Filter-/
