Welcome to our forum Oxfordmark. I am afraid that you are in the position that many new fish keepers find themselves. You have been sold a very nice set of hardware but it is not ready for fish in its present state. What you have has the potential to truly become good fish keeping equipment, but it is not truly ready. Here is what you need to understand. All fish produce some ammonia at their gills and all decaying organic matter adds to that ammonia, whether it be rotting fish food or fish wastes. What we need to do is remove that ammonia by converting to to nitrites. Unfortunately nitrites are also toxic to fish so the nitrites must be moved along to nitrates. Nitrates are far less toxic to fish than either ammonia or nitrites. OK so where does that leave a new hobbyist? You have some hardware that the tank manufacturer has given you. It does not yet have a colony of active bacteria or archaea that can convert ammonia to nitrites. Further, it does not have the bacteria to convert nitrites to nitrates. We are faced with developing the needed colonies of bacteria/archaea to do our conversions. That will mean using a source of ammonia for a period of many weeks, maybe as much as a couple of months, to develop those colonies in our filter media. That will truly prepare our filters to handle the poisons our fish produce. Since you do not yet have any fish, consider doing a fishless cycle on your filter. Conceptually it consists of using pure ammonia as a substitute for fish biological loads to begin developing those bacterial colonies. I have a link to fishless cycling techniques in my signature area that will guide you through the process. If you give that a read through and still have any questions, please feel free to come back and ask your questions.
