New To This

[tiggerdan]

hi everyone i'm new to all this

for years my wife and i have always wanted to do this but never took the plunge, we now have a 3 year old son who loves going to watch the fish so we thought why not, i have been doing alot of looking around on here and spoken to lfs.




i set up my tank on sunday 13/5/2012 (family holiday for a week start of june so not looking to add fish until we come home), aqua 30 (24 litres) all i was allowed but pushing for bigger/more, aqua internal 100 filter, superfish combi heater 50 watt nano, have gravel few ornaments including fake plants (looking to plant real ones later) when the tank was filled added tetra aquasafe (measured dose) and tetra safestart (measured dose) sat back and watched, on tuesday 15th went cloudy (bacteria bloom) i think, now cleared friday morning 18th done water tests




how do these look am i doing ok? any advise?




TEMP 25 C (CONSTANT)

PH 7.4

KH TOOK 12 DROPS

CO2 19

NH4 1

NO2 0.1/0.2

NO3 20




THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR ANY HELP ADVISE

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome to the forum tiggerdan.

It looks to me much the same as most people who add the safe start. It has started to decompose and is providing some ammonia to the tank. That accounts for the ammonia and nitrites. The nitrates may be present in your tap water, it is fairly common.

The CO2 looks high, are you trying to grow plants in that tank? What did you use to measure the CO2?

The KH and pH looks like a nice livebearer tank once you get it cycled. We have a thread you can reach from my signature area that will lead you through a fishless cycle process.

Once you are done cycling, you will need to adjust the temperature depending on what fish you decide to keep. For things like guppies you will let it drop about 3 degrees but things like gouramis and bettas will like it at least as warm as you have it.

 

[waterdrop]

Hi tiggerdan and Welcome from me too!

You are quite lucky that your spouse has shared this desire to someday have an aquarium and that she will share the experience with you and your son. It can take the creative efforts of both parents to guide and shape the experience of very young children since the startup of the fish tank hobby doesn't easily present with instant gratification. With care and attention though, there are plenty of opportunities for learning and eventual wonder and excitement for the young. Along the way there can be plenty of learning and pleasure for the adults.

Fishless cycling (this is in my own opinion and not necessarily fully shared in a broad forum such as ours) is not only a humane way to help ensure that small tropical fish are not exposed to suffering and to begin the ecology of your tank, BUT, can also be an important learning experience about the kind of feedback water tests can give you and a period before fish when you can take the time to learn what they need and about the two important species of bacteria that compose the all-important "biofilter" aspect of filtration. The fishless method of cycling can be slow and frustrating but it can also be filled with questions from you and answers from the members about other major beginner topics such as a "stocking plan" and the outline of future ongoing maintenance tasks on the tank. It is actually easier in some respects to get a deeper impression about biofiltration and cycling during this "pre-fish" period because the tank is more unbalanced than it ever will be later and the (hopefully) well-run and mature tank will not yield these same opportunities for observing bacterial colony establishment.

As OM47 observes, the little bottles of starter ingredients put a mix of decomposing material into the water, a bit like using fish food to run a cycle. In a way, this robs you of the chance to see the more simple biology in action. When I read the baseline article of fishless cycling here on TFF, the one by rdd1952, and worked up my first doses of pure household ammonia (NH3) I have to confess that it crossed my mind that I was being duped by some sort of internet hoax. The sincerity in the posts of the members though gave me hope though that the bulk of what I was reading was coming from normal everyday folks and I stuck with the process. In the end I was rewarded. My tank cycled and I gained a whole new understanding about freshwater ecology that I had never appreciated as a child with a basement full of fish tanks. Here I was years later and I daresay tears must have appeared as I realized the ignorance that had driven my attempts back then. How many times had I "cleaned out" my filter in the naive belief that all it was there to do was "filter out dirt." Back then there was no one to explain to me that an entirely different and fascinating process was supposed to be brought about and encouraged and that it all took place on a microbiological level. Ah, probably very few hobbyists or fish shop owners understood much of it back then either!

You and all the other newcomers to the hobby would do well to do well to dive in to the rdd1952 article and then to pepper the experienced fellows like OM47 with questions about your cycle observations and about the whole world of starting up a tank. Good luck with your "real" fishless cycle if you decide to get it going.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Prime Ordeal]

You and all the other newcomers to the hobby would do well to do well to dive in to the rdd1952 article

I beg to differ. That article is based on outdated information and leads to unnecessarily long cycling times. This isn't the place for a discussion on it and I apologise to tiggerdan for raising it here but if you want to cycle your tank in a shorter time, at the very least, don't dose ammonia to above 1ppm.

 

[tiggerdan]

hi thanks for the info, co2 test was looking at a graph in testing kit and looked at PH and KH to give so not accurate.

with regards to fish I'm waiting see what at the end of the cycle will suit my water as I've read on here its easier to tailor your fish to your tank then the other way round,(however my wife and me do have a few in mind but also know that we are limited by size of tank (surface is 770 sq cm so approx 25 cm of fish) Glowlight, white cloud mountain minnow, cherry barb and maybe shrimp to name a few but as I say will wait to see what's best at the time.

update

18.5.12 7 pm added 0.6 ml Ammonia (later realised that I had been had been distracted at the time and should had been 0.4 ml)

19.5.12 10 am (15 hours later) did tests temp. 24.5 c, NH 4 was 6 (which is when I went back and checked and noticed my error amazing how 0.2 ml makes such a difference)

19.5.12 10.30 pm (12.5 hours later) redid tests temp 25 c, NH 4 was 5 (so coming down phew!!!! will not make that mistake again)

will do the tests again in the morning 20.5.12 to see how it goes and will update again.




currently I have no real plants in the tank only three fake ones as that's what my son picked up and wife wanted (I wanted real) however I think we are going to go down the real plant route but not sure if it's best to add now or wait and what to get later, my tank size in CM is 35cm by 22.5cm and 39cm high (24 litres) have blue coloured gravel at the bottom just under 5cm depth. there is a picture in my profile

 

[tiggerdan]

update




did tests this morning, checked tap water and NH4 is under 0.5

tested tank 20.5.12 8.40 am temp 25C and NH4 was still 5

 

[OldMan47]

A reading of 5.0 ppm of ammonia is not at all unexpected for up to a week into a cycle. It takes a while for the very few ammonia oxidizing bacteria, or maybe it is archaea, as we are now learning, to begin to actually affect your cycle statistics.