Setting Up A New Aquarium

[kchung]

Good day, I am setting up a 20 gallon tank, the Aqueon Deluxe Aquarium Kit 20 that I purchased from my local Petco. I plan to have 8 guppies (2 male 6 female). As I type this I am in the middle of setting up the tank and had some general questions:

1. What other fish can I pair the guppies with?
2. How many fish will this tank support?
3. Is it beneficial to use a much larger filter (Aquaclear 70) for this tank?
4. How much gravel should I put in the tank?
5. How much water conditioner should I use per gallon of water?

Thank you all for taking your time to read this, any and all comments are greatly appreciated!

Best,
kchung

 

[Fish Guy]

When dealing with live bearers like guppies, platys, swordtails and mollies you have to keep in mind you'll have lots of fry going around in the tank. So it maybe better just to go with male live bearers. I'd go with 4 male guppies, 4 male platys and maybe 3-4 corys for the bottom. As for the filter that should be fine but there would be a lot of flow from it in a 20 gallon, so you could cut a cola bottle up and use it has a defector for the flow out of the filter. I would go with 2-3 inchwa of gravel enough to keep any plants from floating up.

 

[waterdrop]

The process of setting up your first aquarium can be helped if you think of proceeding in stages. First you need to resolve basic hardware questions like sizing your filter, supplying it with the correct media and obtaining other things you need, like your substrate and conditioner questions. Next you need to understand and carry out a long period of loading the "software" in to the filter hardware, so that you can come up with a "working biofilter." This potentially time consuming period of preparing the biofilter is the perfect time to do what we call "working on a stocking plan," which is where your fish species, tank capacity and fish compatibility questions should be resolved.

So, to comment on your first stage, The AC 70 is a 300gph flow rate filter. That would give a 5x turnover rate for a 60 US gallon tank, much larger than yours. In your tank a 300gph flow will potentially blow the fish around like a washing machine. I think an AC30 or at most an AC50 would be more appropriate. Another option might be the smallest of the Rena external cannister filters. You might also want to perform some searches on the forum and see if you can dig up some discussions about filter media, or there may be some good discussions of this in the Beginners Resource Center.

~~waterdrop~~