Aeration

Buckfish

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I am on the verge of adding my first fish. The local aquarium store checked the water last Saturday and the nitrate is almost as it should the rest is good.

I have a 60l tank and three aeration points tubed into the tank, a disc, a small and medium bar linked to the air pump.

Is this ok?

The filter is flowing at an average rate also, so any feedback before i buy an assortment of danios and white cloud moutain minnows!!
 
As long as the filter is flowing into the tank and is moving the water near the surface of the tank, there is plenty of aeration. The bubbles from an air stone don't do much to aerate the water, they are mostly for decoration.

How long have you had the tank set up Buckfish? In many cases the LFS will tell you to set a tank up for so many days and bring in a water sample. When you do that, they sell you your first fish and then the fun begins. Unless you have been working on cycling your tank using ammonia, you have a sterile tank that will very definitely have good water in it. It is good because it is straight tap water which fish can live in quite nicely. The problem is the sterile part. What happens when you put those fish into the water is that they produce ammonia continuously. In very small concentrations, ammonia is toxic to fish.

We are lucky that there are bacteria that can convert ammonia to nitrites but those bacteria need to become established in the tank's filter. We do that on this forum, and on many others, by using some small amounts of pure ammonia to mimic the fish being present. The bacteria don't know any better and they go ahead and grow with the ammonia being used by them. Now the bad news, nitrites are also quite poisonous in small concentrations. There is more good news though. Another species of bacteria can process nitrites to nitrates, and nitrates are almost harmless in reasonable levels. What our ammonia additions do then is start growing the ammonia processors and in the process they put nitrites into the water. The nitrite processors can now grow and expand their numbers until one day you dose the ammonia and 12 hours later you come back and test and can't find any ammonia or nitrites. At that point we say that your tank has cycled. A cycled tank gets a big water change to remove the built up nitrates and the fish get moved in. Instead of being poisoned by their own ammonia, the new fish live in an environment that is free of ammonia and free of nitrites. Every week or two you remove some of the far less toxic nitrates with a partial water change and the fish never realize there was anything at all wrong with their water, because there wasn't.

The alternative that many pet shops set you up for is not as easy but it can be done. You add your fish to that sterile environment and the fish supply the ammonia, instead of a bottle. Now you need to control the ammonia at a low enough level that the fish stay healthy. You do that with massive daily water changes, often in the 30% to 50% range. Once the nitrites start to show up, the water changes become larger and more frequent because each 1 ppm of ammonia becomes 2.7 ppm of nitrites after it is converted, but both are toxic above around 0.25 ppm. After the same amount of time as it took for the fishless cycle to finish, often a month or two, the fish-in cycle finishes. Either method will work but I would rather kick back and add a few drops of ammonia regularly while doing some minor water testing than change half the water in my tank every day and still do the testing to avoid any nasty surprises for my fish. It is our choice which way to go.

There are links to fish-in and fishless cycle methods in my signature area because so many people arrive without being aware of the need to cycle. You have gotten lucky by posting before stocking your tank and then finding out what you have gotten into.
 
The tank has been set up exactly fourteen days ago to the day. I took a water sample into the LFS on Saturday last weekend and the only issue was with the nitrate, i.e. slightly high. I was told to 10% water change every other day for 7 days. I use tap water and a small amount of boiled water and add the advised level of tetra tap safe and tetra easy balance each change of water.

If I now add ammonia as I have completed the second of the above water changes could I consider fish this weekend as the 7 days will have lapsed.

I really appreciate your advice .....very informative.
 
Fish at this point is not a good idea. Please read through the thread on fishless cycling a tank, there is a link to it in my signature area. Your water chemistry is probably great right now, because you have no fish in it. The problem is not the present water conditions, but what those conditions will quickly become if you have not properly prepared the filter. If you add fish before preparing the filter properly, you will be forced to do a fish-in cycle, which is a ton more work than a fishless, but you do get to watch the fish while you do one. If you read through the techniques for both methods and decide to go with fish right away anyway, you need to have a good supply of water dechlorinator on hand and a good liquid type test kit so that you will know how big and how often the water changes need to be.
 
Just to give you another opinion: I agree with OM47. Fishless is the way to go, specificailly the add and wait method. It's cheaper, faster, easier, etc. It's a real no brainer and it's better for the fish.
 

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