First week water results

Essjay said:

With shoaling fish like neon tetras you need more than 5 and they need to be added all at the same time. Experiments have shown that 10 is a better minimum number than 5 or 6 with shoaling fish.

As long as the plants are a lot bigger than when you put them in, it should be OK to add 10 neons, but keep an eye on both ammonia and nitrite for several days until you are sure they are both remaining at zero. If either show up, you'll need to do a water change as they will harm the fish while you wait for the plants to deal with any ammonia, and plants won't remove nitrite.
Have we ascertained your tap water hardness yet? If you have hard water, neons aren't suitable, but they are in soft water.

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Essjay said:

That 7.5 is pH not hardness. My pH is also around 7.5 but I have soft water.

Look on our water company's website again; ignore any words they use for hardness as they'll make it sound harder than it really is and look for numbers. You'll also need the unit of measurement, exactly as they write it as there are half a dozen different units they could use. There are 3 different 'degree' units and another 3 'mg/l' units so you need the name of the degree or whatever the mg/l is in as well.

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Essjay said:

The two figures you need are hardness 268 mg/l CaCO3 (also called ppm) and German degrees at 16 (which is also known as dH). Make a note of those two numbers and units as fish profiles use one or the other and you'll need them when checking the hardness any fish need.

This is hard to very water so neons are not suitable, I'm afraid. But the guppies you mentioned are. As are most of the rainbowfish species - there are a couple of soft water species so check before buying. The website Seriously Fish is the best one out there for checking a species' requirements

Knowledge Base — Seriously Fish

www.seriouslyfish.com

Guppies - if you get mixed males and females you need more females than males, and all the females will have fry every month. Males only gets round this potential over stocking. Females only will still produce lots of fry if they've ever been in a tank with a male as they can store sperm and use it for months to come.

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Essjay said:

No that's fine. Strictly speaking you only need to make sure the temperature in the bag and tank are equal, despite what the shop might say you don't need to add tank water to the bag. This is because it actually takes days, weeks or even months for the fish to acclimatise to the tank water not an hour or less. And next time, net the fish out of the bag as the less shop water that goes in your tank the better.


By the time they are put in your tank the fish have been through a lot. They've been shipped from the breeder, probably in another country, then kept at the wholesaler then shipped to the shop where they've been stared at and chased round the tank every time someone has bought fish from that tank. Then put in a bag and carried to your tank and released into a totally new environment. It can take fish days to settle in. Keep an eye on them (and the water). Keep the tank lights off till tomorrow as that will help them settle, and the plants will be OK with that for such a short time.

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Essjay said:

Gouramis are soft water fish, unfortunately, and the sharks have to have very carefully chosen tank mates (your new guppies probably wouldn't stand much chance) Note the sized tank they need and the 'behaviour and compatibility' section

Epalzeorhynchos bicolor – Red-Tailed Black Shark (Labeo bicolor) — Seriously Fish

www.seriouslyfish.com

The reason we go on about hardness is that fish have evolved to cope with the hardness in their natural water.
Soft water has few minerals so fish which have evolved in soft water have physiology which hangs on the hardness minerals. Put them in hard water and they continue to hang on to the minerals and they get calcium deposits in their organs, especially their kidneys.
Hard water has a lot of minerals and hard water fish have physiology which excretes these minerals. Put them in soft water and they continue to excrete them but can't replace them so they suffer calcium deficiency.
In both scenarios the fish do not live as long as they should.

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Essjay said:

No that's fine. Strictly speaking you only need to make sure the temperature in the bag and tank are equal, despite what the shop might say you don't need to add tank water to the bag. This is because it actually takes days, weeks or even months for the fish to acclimatise to the tank water not an hour or less. And next time, net the fish out of the bag as the less shop water that goes in your tank the better.


By the time they are put in your tank the fish have been through a lot. They've been shipped from the breeder, probably in another country, then kept at the wholesaler then shipped to the shop where they've been stared at and chased round the tank every time someone has bought fish from that tank. Then put in a bag and carried to your tank and released into a totally new environment. It can take fish days to settle in. Keep an eye on them (and the water). Keep the tank lights off till tomorrow as that will help them settle, and the plants will be OK with that for such a short time.

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Characf said:

On sites like Tropco and a couple of other one's I can't see anything about hardness but I'll be sure to check before I purchase anything. And compatibility on red tail sharks is yellow with guppies so 'low to potential risk' so bit of a difficult one. I deffo want some Cory's or yoyo loaches. But I'll have to go back to the drawing board and see what works but for now these guppies seem happy. This new filter I'm getting should remove nitrates and hardness so I can bring down my levels quite a lot

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Byron said:

It is fine to research various fish, but don't make any snap decisions as you will live to regret them. The fish mentioned in the last couple of posts have very differing requirements respecting not only water parameters (GH especially), but also substrate, compatibility problems.

I went back and cannot find mention of the tank dimensions, but from the photo I am assuming the length to be maybe 4 feet (120 cm)? This is OK for the loaches but the water hardness is higher than it should be, though I will skip this and go on. Corydoras need soft sand substrate, this is black gravel, but cories also need softer water. The loaches, a group of no fewer than five (they are very highly social and quickly develop an hierarchy) or six, are better here. I would suggest you get some substantial floating plants though, as loaches are negatively impacted by overhead light and a good cover of floaters like Water Sprite, Water Lettuce, or Frogbit would help a lot. Also help with water conditions.

The Red Tail Shark is not a good community fish. It has space here, and as the only substrate fish would work. I personally would find this long a tank (again assuming 4 feet) with jut one substrate fish less interesting than with a group of playful scampering loaches, but that is up to you. But the RTS is very limiting. It frequently for some reason takes a real dislike to upper fish with vertical pattern, and this means the several suitable barb species are not good here. They would do well with the group of loaches however. This is another factor for consideration when we are building a community tank...selecting fish "x" may limit many others that would otherwise be well suited.

As for Tropco, one must always keep in mind that commercial sites like this one exist to sell fish. Unfortunately, such sites are not always reliable. Some are better than others, and when I looked up the RTS on Tropco it does say pretty well that this fish is trouble. It is indeed "very territorial." If one has several tanks and can spare a 4-foot tank for this fish and upper suitable companions, that is one thing, but restricting your options in your only tank is a road I would not go down as it is likely to be unrewarding.

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