Newbe Was Seen Walk In To The Doors Of Fish Store

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went into a fish store and they got the newby by the gills.... sold me 2x20 gal tanks and and all the accesories.... told me to wash all accessories and fill tanks with water and run pumps for 48 hrs and come back to get fish. they told me to put 6 tiger barbs and 4 ballas in one tank with a couple of bottom feeders, tank 2 2 collumian sharks 10 neon tets and a couple bottm feeders. cost me over $1000 canadian. tank 2 died in 48- 55 hrs, tank one looked promising until week 2 and every night 2-3 would die till tankemptied. store said i was not aclimatizing the told me to leave fish in bag in tank for 4 hrs. they sold me anouther 20 fish and within 10 days i was left with 1 tank and 3 fish those three fish have been doing great for 2 weeks.. they said nothing about test kits or cycling... scared to get more fish as my wife says get rid of everything... any ideas... won't go back to the store that sold me what i have and every other store tells me differant things. what do i believe.

 

[snakequeen]

I would read up on here about cycling your tanks before you buy anymore fish.
Theres loads of helpful threads on here.
Have a read through and you cant go wrong

 

[5teady_2012]

Pets stores are a pain in the ass for this...

The filter has to mature berfore fish can be added..

It takes 3-4 weeks and you should NOT add fish until the stats are reading correct..

When fish stores tell you to leave the filter running for a while before adding fish, it does nothing (tell them this) the tank cant through the nitrogen cycle unless its started (using Ammonia).

Like above says, have a good read of the cycling thread

please dont get anymore fish and tell your lfs to sort themselves out and learn what to do grrrrrrrrrrrrr

 

[PlatinumAngel]

oh man what a pita! and a cost!! I just finished cycling a 75 gallon with fish, I know the pain it is! I just got a new tank and am def going to fishless cycle it. Hopefully your other fish survive, but if they don't I wouldn't buy any more fish until it's cycled. What arses at the LFS, I'd ask for my money back as the advice they gave you was the reason they are dying.

 

[NonstickRon]

I feel your pain man.

You should:
1) Get your money back for the fish. Seriously. Find someone who is a good talker to go with you if you need to. Your pissed off wife might be just the ticket.
Good cop bad cop them. Don't get violent/belligerent or make threats, but be firm and insistent. You'd be amazed at what you can achieve as a consumer.
Is it a chain store like Petsmart? If so, go to corporate level if you need to. (Please tell me you saved receipts?)
2) Do NOT shop at that store ever again, or at least till you know more about aquariums than they do and then educate them
3) Read read READ READ!!! There are tons of resources online. I've been into aquariums exactly 3 week and I already know more than the people at the pet store.
4) Join a forum and ask questions till you can't think of anymore. Then do some reading till you can think of more and come back and ask them.
5) Check out Bio Spira / Bactinettes / Tetra Safestart - opinions are mixed but everyone agrees that it at least speeds up the process.
(Only three brands of "bacteria in a bottle" that are thought to actually do anything)
6) Stick to round bodied tetras to start.
I was recommended Serpae Tetras (also known as Red Miner Tetra). Cheap, extremely hardy, more interesting to watch than some of the other starter fish.
7) Ditch the gravel now while you're starting over, sand is much prettier and the bottom feeders prefer it and are fun to watch play in it.
I wish I'd known about using sand before I'd started tank #1. I'm waiting for my tank to be more established before switching over now.

 

[LauraFrog]

Also, don't buy more sharks. they just get too big for a 20 gal tank. I'd be very, very careful about going back near that shop. Sounds like they don't have a clue.

 

[simonmac2]

Puternut,

i feel for your predicament, but it is not all bad. I am new at this and had been sold a new tank and fish, but came on here luckily before i had any corpses. Once you have read up on cycling, I would get a small (9L or there abouts) tank and call it the "quarantine tank you needed to get anyway" to the missus - a cheap plastic one will do. Put the remaining 3 fish in there with fresh dechlorinated water, and with your new master test kit [which you WILL get when you get the small tank] baseline the readings for your tapwater and your Q tank. Having the fish in the Q tank means it doesn't take long to do water changes when they produce all the ammonia - my little tank didn't even have a filter or pump so small daily water changes and the fish kept really well while the other tank cycled.

you probably should empty out the 2 main tanks, clean well MW recomends thin bleach and it worked a treat with my 2nd tank, clean everything and rinse really well, then start cycling your tank(s)

ideally if you had another fishy pal, you could get some of their filter media to speed up the cycling process. At the very least you need to add pure Ammonia in order to start the bacteria growth.

This is a really great forum for finding out stuff, and even when I have done [REALLY] doughnut things, i've been educated rather than flamed - it's a great community and i hope you'll stay around.

FWIW my wife slagged me off for 6 weeks until the tank had cycled and the fish got moved to the main tank from the Q tank. Now it is pretty and the fish are swimming around happily, she sits in front of it quite contented as the community fish are nicely shoaling.

Regards

Simon

 

[Aqua Duck]

What i would do from now in is research everything you need to know online and in books as the means of building your knowledge and discount anything your LFS's say, using them purely to buy your equipment/stock (unless you have other LFS's you know are knowledgeable and reliable.)

That's what i've done for quite some time as i just can't trust what they say.

 

[NonstickRon]

Not every person in that store is bad because experience you've had. They have to have at least 1 knowledgeable person, to keep their own fish alive. It's probably either the owner/manager or one really hardcore employee. At the very least, use the "I need to speak to someone who knows more than you" tact and see if you can talk to them. A lot of times, a job like that will pay total crap and they end up stuck with some idiot who just cares about making enough to buy his/her beer/make-up.

I've been using my local Petsmart for most of my fishy needs, and I've had encounters with all ends of that spectrum. From the pissy 17 year old who thinks she knows everything, the grizzled older guy who doesn't really give a crap about anything as long as you go away so he can stand there and stare at fish again, the inexperienced but honest and eager to learn youngling, to the one lady who seems to really have made aquariums her life and has been a wealth of information.

You havn't said if you went to a mom'n'pop or a chain store but if you went to a chain, then try to find that 1 person who keeps the fish alive for them and explain the situation. If you went to the former, try and talk to the owner. Most people who open up aquarium shops do it because they love it, I'd imagine anyway, and that is the person you want to talk to.

 

[BoldBear]

I recently bought a 60 ltr Tank with a filter and heating, I set the tank up with Base substrate, then put washed gravel on top. I then half filled it and planted the plants (50% artificial & 50% real) filled it up completely and left it for a few days and then bought all the fish at once. (ten neon tetras, three 2" angels, two 1" gormays and two 1" black and orange striped bottom feeders)

I lost a couple of tetras within the first two days and my Angels where swimming near the surface most of the time after a couple of days. however the other fish appeared to be acting quite normally.

Then I found FishForums.Net and realised that I had only done a part of it right, so I went out and bought a test kit which showed me how much I had to learn as two of the four water tests failed miserably.

I did a 30% water change (using clean water from my Garden water butt so that it wasn't fresh tap water after acclimatising it to the tank temperature). and added filter booster bacteria as specified in the test results.
NB. I have also started to use the Tetra plant food which came with the substrate.

The fish seem a lot better now I only hope it's not completely impossible to correct things yet without having to buy another tank for my fish while I start all over again doing it properly this time.

I wonder how many others who don't know better are doing a similar thing?

 

[alysonpeaches]

If you are the type to read books, here is one Ive found really helpful

"The Complete Idiots Guide to Freshwater Aquariums" by Mike Wickham. (dont let the title put you off - its really good and informative, but it doesnt get too technical.

Also, given that you have bypassed fishless cycling and you already have some fish in, the temptation is to buy more. Hold back a while. Find out about the fish you want as some need a mature tank, some arent suitable for beginners etc.. You can research this on the net.

Another brilliant piece of advice is find a local fish breeder. They give you loads of advice and tend to sell their fish at extremely low prices BUT they generally live longer than the ones in the shops in my experience. One way to find a local breeder is to see if you have a local aquatic society. Some of them have internet forums. Some kind members also sometimes give you freebies if they have excess stock, or sell them at give away prices.

Good luck with your tanks.

 

[Nick16]

boldbear, it is not always wise to add all of the fish together as it overloads the filter and the bacteria have not grown yet. add a few fish every week or every other week. therefore you reduce losses and save money. youre tank will not be fully stocked for at least a month.

 

[NonstickRon]

One thing I keep seeing mentioned in my online research on forums and question/answer sites is a product called PRIME. Apparently it detoxifies your ammonia, nitrites and nitrates without removing them. The biggest drawback seems to be your test kit will keep testing positive for them and you kinda just have to hope you have enough in there to take care of it...guess you would just have to keep adding it till you got a zero reading for ammonia/nitrites. Dosage seems a bit of a pain, 1ml per 10 gallons...not sure how you would keep the right dosage when doing a partial water change on a ten gallon tank. It says right on the bottle that its ok to use when cycling though. Again, opinions vary.

 

[vinylman]

I recently bought a 60 ltr Tank with a filter and heating, I set the tank up with Base substrate, then put washed gravel on top. I then half filled it and planted the plants (50% artificial & 50% real) filled it up completely and left it for a few days and then bought all the fish at once. (ten neon tetras, three 2" angels, two 1" gormays and two 1" black and orange striped bottom feeders)

I lost a couple of tetras within the first two days and my Angels where swimming near the surface most of the time after a couple of days. however the other fish appeared to be acting quite normally.

Then I found FishForums.Net and realised that I had only done a part of it right, so I went out and bought a test kit which showed me how much I had to learn as two of the four water tests failed miserably.

I did a 30% water change (using clean water from my Garden water butt so that it wasn't fresh tap water after acclimatising it to the tank temperature). and added filter booster bacteria as specified in the test results.
NB. I have also started to use the Tetra plant food which came with the substrate.

The fish seem a lot better now I only hope it's not completely impossible to correct things yet without having to buy another tank for my fish while I start all over again doing it properly this time.

I wonder how many others who don't know better are doing a similar thing?

I hope you returned the Angels; they need a tank at least 18'' high.

 

[OldMan47]

Prime is one of the brand names for dechlorinator. It gets lots of good press for two reasons. Fist reason is that it works and costs much less to use than most other brands. Second is that it helps fish survive if you have an ammonia or nitrite problem until you get a chance to deal with it through water changes.
If your remaining live fish are in one tank you could do a fishy cycle on it. It will take many more water changes than a fishless cycle but it can be done safely if you are careful with it. Meantime there is no reason not to start a fishless cycle on the other tank. I saw a suggestion to clean and chlorinate the fishless tank and must disagree. If there is no evidence of disease in the fish that died but they just died from chemical stresses (poisoning), the tank has probably started to build a bacterial colony that could be encouraged to become your cycled tank by adding ammonia and waiting.