What Am I Doing Wrong?

[ILikeDemFish]

Hello! I'm new here but not new to fishkeeping
Anyways, my local Petsmart has a sale on Guppies. $1 for males and $0.50 for females. Wonderful right?
My 26 gallon tall tank has one male molly, two male platys, one powder blue gourami, and a five inch pleco that have been living healthly and happily for about a year and a half now. My tank is filtered and heated. I have tried to add gupies to my tank three times in the last year and every time I do, they die within the hour. They do this think where they swim up to the top and sink back down util finally they die
I don't understand! Hwlp?

 

[KrystaK]

do you float acclimate your guppies or do you just drop them in the tank? The water chemistry may be very different in the pet smart tanks compared to your home tank. Unless the guppies are all sick (Which is possible, but if you've tried three times is unlikely) than if acclimated properly (Over a few hour period if possible) they should do just fine.

By acclimation I mean you should improvise a method to slowly introduce water from the tank into the bag the fish came in. (I usually just introduce a quarter cup of water to the bag every 10-15 minutes because I can't figure out how to do a drip method for the life of me - ash someone else for a drip method if you like)

Hope I've helped

 

[OldMan47]

Hi there and welcome Demfish.
I always try to drip acclimate my new fish. That means that I open the bag from the fish shop and dump the water and fish into a gallon container. Often the water from the bag makes the bucket only about 1/2 inch deep or even less. Once I have the fish in there, I start a very slow siphon going from the tank to my gallon bucket. At a drop every second or so it will take quite a while before the bucket fills up but I am fine with that. The way I slow the flow so much is by tying a simple overhand knot in a piece of air line and tightening the knot until I am happy with the drip rate. Once the gallon bucket is full, the water in the bucket is mostly tank water. I go to the nearest sink and dump that bucket through a fish net, then I add the fish, not the water, to my tank. By doing things that way, the fish never experience a shock due to new water and they almost always survive the transition.
If you have water suitable for a molly and a couple of platies, simple guppies should survive the transition easily.

 

[Jumpspin]

This isn't a proven fact but i had two gouramis and a few guppies in my tank and the gouramis where so aggressive! so i don't know if they had a helping hand?

 

[Ny82]

I used to be like this. I couldn't keep my guppies alive for more than a few hours, I didn't know what was going wrong. I started hating them-until my tank was properly cycled. Now they are happy and healthy and breeding lol. I think the gourami is a prime suspect! When I had mine (a gold gourami) he was so aggressive and used to chase and nip everything in the tank until I rehomed him