Hi everyone!! I'm so excited to share about my recent dive into aquariums and fish keeping!I got a standard 10gal tank off CL a few months ago for super cheap. No chips or obvious damage so I was stoked. When I got it home and tested it for leaks, though, it could almost not hold water at all. The sealant was over 10 years old- assembly date sticker on the bottom of the tank was from 2014!!
So a few weeks later after my disappointment wore off I found my paint scraping razor and rubbing alcohol and went to town getting every bit of sealant and caked on grime/dust/crud off. Applying new sealant was surprisingly easy! If you're thinking about doing some sealant work, I cannot reccomend highly enough to use nitrile gloves and a quality respirator. That gunk is sticky and stinky!
After waiting an agonizing 48 hours for the sealant to cure, I slowly added water to test for leaks, and....... it held water!!!!!
I immediately went out and got a bag of substrate and some live plants, and gave the river rock I planned on using a good rinse.
Substrate and plants went in with some conditioned tap water followed by pebbles and rocks, and soon enough it was full!
I knew about cycling from doing some reading but didn't have any ammonia to get things going so I just put in a couple pinches of flakes and an algae pellet in a couple times a week, as well as a good splash of some bottled bacteria. I never saw an ammonia spike or nitrates/nitrites, or any large amount of algae growth so I was worried something was wrong. Looking back, I think I just did everything gradually enough and started with a lot of live plants and bacteria that everything was kind of balanced out of the gate!
After a week or so, all the plants have new growth. Still no inhabitants, I'm feeling nervous and disrupting things when it's going well so far.
After about 6 weeks of very steady/consistent test results, I decided to bite the bullet and start with a few shrimps. 5 golden yellow dudes from the fish shop down the street.
Sadly 2 of them die in the 48 hours after being introduced to the tank and a third just disappears. I think they might have just been old. They were all drip acclimated over about an hour.
A week and more more shrimp deaths later I got 11 candy cane shrimpies. And bonus-- that missing yellow shrimp showed up!!!
A week after that, I got 3 otocinclus and a horned nerite and very sadly all 3 fish died in very different and unexpected ways. One got the zoomies and smacked its head on the glass I'm pretty sure it gave itself a fatal concusion. The second swam into the bubbles from the air stone and immediately started twitching and spasming and eventually went belly up. The third was resting and munch algae on a pothos root/vine and suddenly stopped moving and floated away belly up. No idea why any of that happenrd but if you have ideas please let me know!
The snail is totally fine though. He likes to climb to the top of the tank and then fall down and hide for a couple days, then repeat.
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