A couple of newbie questions

[SodaMonkey]

Morning all.

Newbie to the forum this morning, and very amateur fishkeeper .

I have a couple of questions that are stemming from setting up a new aquarium on Tuesday. The story behind this is my partner finding a tank at a local boot sale/flea market a while back and me wanting to change to it from our existing Biorb 30L.

So basically the "new" tank is an old model of an Internet Fishbox. It's been hard to work out the exact capacity but it's somewhere close to 50L. I've been a bit a*al with buying filter/heater etc, and kept to the Interpet brand, partly because the filter is designed to hang on the back of the tank and a cut out in the lid accommodates this.

This is where my first question comes in - When I first had the tank I measured the dimensions and tried to figure out what capacity it was from looking at the current Fishbox tanks on the Interpet website and checking the sizes on there. I thought I had a tank somewhere around the 30L size so bought a filter accordingly. Turns out it's actually the 50 something litre model. Based on my initial workings out I bought a CF Mini filter unit, the tech blurb says they are for aquariums up to 35 litres.

It's all up and running at the moment, without fish, and won't be stocked for about 10 days or so. Do you guys think the CF Mini will filter the tank ok, or is it too small, and should I move up to the CF 1, which is for aquariums up to 68 litres?

The second question is regarding driftwood and tannins in the water. I've done a fair bit of reading yesterday about boiling the wood then cold water, then boiling again etc, and to do this over a long enough period to have the water as clear as possible. However not knowing too much about driftwood, I just followed the aquatic centre advice when I bought it of soaking it in hot water a couple of times.

This has now obviously resulted in tannins in the aquarium, and the water currently looking like the photo below, the water looks browner with the white LEDs off.

I'm hoping it might clear somewhat by the time I stock the tank, this is potentially leading into the question of if the current filter is good enough to help clear it, or if a bigger filter would be better? Would a water change also help or would it really not make a big difference and the wood just leach more tannins into it?

I've read differing answers to the tannins issue, some people are saying that they can be bad for the fish/water and others saying not to worry as it's good for the fish?

So any advice will be much appreciated, but please keep it to layman's terms.

 

[GaryE]

I don't know the companies you're dealing with, as they aren't seen here, but I'll stay general.

I always use a filter larger than what manufacturers suggest. Using less of a filter can be an issue, however, a lot depends on what creatures go into the tank. Different fish need different filtration.

The same is true for tannins. I have older driftwood here, and its tannin days are done. I just set up a tank, last weekend, wit clear water, and my first task was to add tannins and stain the water. This is because of the fish I was putting in, who thrive in stained water.
I have other tanks with other species that hate tannins, and I use tannins and wood accordingly.

There's no way around - you will have to read up before you buy fish for that small tank. It's fun. You can ignore that advice (most do), but poor choices mean more work.

Forget the word 'fish' and check species. Their needs can be so different, and that affects how we set up for them. One size fits all never works out.