Honey Gouramis

[scottinnes]

had my tank up for a month now got 6 harlequins and got 6 bronze cory catfish wondering when i could put a few honey gouramis in?

 

[Dutsey]

had my tank up for a month now got 6 harlequins and got 6 bronze cory catfish wondering when i could put a few honey gouramis in?

What is the size of the tank?

 

[scottinnes]

holds 88 litres

 

[brian2708]

Have you tested your water quality at all to make sure all is good in the filter?

 

[scottinnes]

got it checked last monday but goin to get it checked again possibly tomorrow

 

[brian2708]

got it checked last monday but goin to get it checked again possibly tomorrow

It's best to test yourself ideally.

You can pick up an API test master kit for £20 from a well known auction site.

If you've only had it setup for a month, it's possible the filter hasn't established it's cycle yet so it's best to ensure that is all good before putting more fish in, otherwise you maybe be putting your fish in ammonia soup!

 

[waterdrop]

Agree. There are any number of things that can go wrong with using store testing. Sometimes the new assistants will actually not know how to conduct the tests correctly and either simply do it wrong or not want to communicate their doubts to anyone. Sometimes assistants or owners are in too much of a rush because of other customers or something else to want to wait the proper amount for the test. Sometimes the test reagents are old, although in an active store this is not usually a problem. But worst of all, the desire for sales may color the judgements made and change what is reported to the customer. Anything that is non-numerical and where the customer is not also allowed to participate in the color match is suspect. The judgement of what the numbers mean should also be made by the aquarist, not the seller, and if the aquarist feels not qualified to do that then it means they are should be here learning in our beginners section! All this is to say that by far our advice is to obtain a good master kit, as suggested, and learn to use it! As a beginner I would buy a master kit before buying my first tank!

OK, now that you've listened to us fuss ( ) I will say that you have three nice solid easy beginner species under discussion here and Honeys are usually nice hardy easy-going and beautiful fish, so what's under discussion are normal things. A nice working biofilter that's not leaving any traces of ammonia or nitrite(NO2) showing up in any of the daily checks (at under two months an aquarist wants to be still doing daily water checks) and nice weekly gravel-clean-water-changes are givens. As a hobbyist within your first 2 years in the hobby you want to be checking several web sources for reports of what the maximum size of the species might be when the fish grows old, fat and happy so to speak. This number should then form part of your guesstimate of how to be somewhere near the inch guideline.. and in the case of your three species the body mass is pretty normal, so the max length can be used normally in your estimate in my opinion.

~~waterdrop~~