New Tank

[vinylman]

once a day and what they eat in 10 seconds sounds much better to me, you should look to feed a variety as well not just flake food. starve day once a week

one of the important lessons to learn in fishkeeping is not to trust the packaging. all manufacturers want you to keep buying they're products so will tell you to use more of them or that they need replacing every month (in the case of filter media) which is absolute rubbish. overfeedig your fish is one of the most common mistakes.

most fish live on the brink of starvation in the wild eating sporadically. your fish will survive for 2 weeks without any feeding perfectly fine so there's really no need at all to feed 3 times a day!

Wiggle,
i was just browsing this post when you said you dont need to change your filter cartridge every month....really? i always thought every month sounded kinda like a lot, considering how much beneficial bacteria build up on there. How often would you suggest changing a filter cartridge in general? you are always very knowladgable (spelling) so i figured who better to ask than you...

Do you mean a cartridge, or sponges?. If you use sponges, all you need to do is squeeze them out in old tankwater when you do a water change. You can basically use them until they are almost falling apart. If you throw them away every month, you're throwing away all the bacteria you've spent time building up. If you have two sponges in the filter, squeeze them out alternately at water changes. When you do need to throw them away, change them separately; first one, then the other about a month later.

 

[dwarfgourami]

right the mrs got inpatient, we now have a scissortail barbera (spelling?), 4 black neons and a sucking loach.
also found out 35litre is actually about 8 gallon, so slightly smaller than i thought. think i am going to do a large (30-40%) water change daily as my tank isnt going to be able to handdle the ammonia at the moment and hope that should be enough

errr...what species is the sucking loach? This is the term used either for the common pleco (grows enormous!) or the Chinese Algae Eater (grows big!). It could be an otocinclus, with luck, but they are schooling fish and shouldn't be in a new tank, so again not a good idea.

Is that a scissortail rasbora? Schooling, too, I believe.

 

[supraking]

sucking loach, tbh i dont know which species it is,
and the scissortail seems to be schooling fine with the 3 neons

 

[Miss Wiggle]

get a pic of the sucking loach for us please, we'll ID it. It's likely to be a serious problem fish so betetr to get it sorted now and returned to the lfs if it's inappropriate. If it's a common plec it could potentially get to 2 foot long, fairly obviously too big for your tank. If it's a CAE, it'll be slightly smaller at 1 foot long but twice as mean

re the filters, different media requires changing at different times, however most of them you can ignore the manufacturers recommendations.

the only thing i can think of that needs changing weekly is filter floss, that doesn't hold much bacteria it just traps muck and poop so change it whenever it's really dirty (this will obviously depend on the bio load of the tank) but roughly weekly

carbon only works for about 12 hrs so shouldn't be used for 'everyday' filtration. It's very good at removing toxins from the water though so it's best to keep some in the cupboard then if you spill something in the tank or have to miedcate then want to remove the medications, you can put some in and take it out 12 hrs later and bin it. Now carbon's a tricky topic, some people love it some hate it, if you want to read more just search the site there's a lot of threads going into the arguments surrounding it, I won't reguritate them all here. What I've put above is just my opinion.

sponges you should only change when they are literally falling apart, you should get a couple of years out of them at least.

things like ceramic media, noodles, bio balls etc, again when they start to fall apart you know it's time to change them, but not a minute sooner.

HTH