Some Beginner Questions

[breeks]

Hi,

my daughter got an 80L aquarium for christmas and is wanting to keep guppies.

We did an initial setup of the tank yesterday and it's sitting empty of fish at the moment.

We've got a couploe of, probably daft, questions :

1) What sort of environment suits guppies - by that I mean how do we know if the water "chemistry" will be good for them? What whould we put in the tank to make it guppy friendly? How many should we put in to start with?
2) As I'm a complete novice at this sort of thing I just wanted a steer on the type of heater to get and how to set it up. Through a bit of reading I've kind of narrowed it down to a Fluval E200 but not 100% sure if that's overkill for a relatively small tank and also how reliable they are. Also on positioning of the heater, the Fluval looks like it's vertical only, the filter that comes with the tank pushes water out top to bottom - would siting the heater vertically beside the filter get the required flow of warmed water through the tank? Read a few heater horror stories so keen to make the right choice here!

TIA....

 

[CaptainBarnicles]

Hi there, if you don't have a water testing kit I suggest you get one before you do anything else. It's essential for cycling your tank and to keep an eye of parameters throughout its lifetime.

Please make sure you cycle before you add livestock unless you're committed to doing large water changes every single day until the tank is cycled, again essential for the safety of your livestock

As for what fish would be suitable...it all depends on what kind of water you have, as in, hard or soft water

 

[ClownLurch]

First find out your water PH and hardness figures on your water suppliers website. Fish thrive or merely survive in different types of water. The website may not actually give numbers but there’s posters on here know how to decipher the wording. Once you have them then it’s possible to figure out which fish are best for your water. Most of Scotland is soft water I believe.

Read up about cycling your tank on here.

If there’s any fish you already like the look of then insert their name into the search function on seriouslyfish.com then click on it when it comes up. That’ll lead you to an A4 sized info sheet on all your fishes requirements: water hardness/ph/temp, min tank size, tank mates etc etc. It’s good for beginners as it’s science backed as opposed to some kid with a few fish and time on their hands spouting off.

Have fun and welcome btw.
This is the best most welcoming site on the internet for beginners.

 

[GaryE]

ClownLurch covered almost everything, but I would underline the importance of knowing your local water. In my very soft water, guppies do poorly without my doctoring their conditions, and that's not something you want to start out doing. You can save that learning curve for when you're truly addicted to the hobby. Or, you can pick up a few products and handle it easily enough.

Heater size depends on how cold the room is. For that size, 100w would be good. have some fluvals here, and they are pretty good. 10 years ago, they had a bad run, but my more recent ones are very solid. You need to monitor temperature as heaters are the weak link. Even the good ones are not always 100% trustworthy in time.

The warmth distributes very easily in a tank that size with any sort of flow.

I'll hijack things for question that might help. I have kept and bred a lot of guppies over the years, but they have always been wild types started with fish direct from either Trinidad or Colombia. They never even needed heaters to thrive. How important is warmth for the breeder made, huge tailed fancy guppies. Are they more fragile than wilds, as we see with domestic mollies?

 

[Essjay]

Patience is a virtue when it comes to fish keeping. Don't rush anything.

Firstly the tank needs to be prepared. There are two ways to do this depending on whether you intend to have live plants or not. There are links to the methods here - fishless cycling and plant/silent cycling.

Cycle Your Tank! A Complete Guide For Beginners

Fishless cycling https://www.fishforums.net/threads/cycling-your-new-fresh-water-tank-read-this-first.421488/ Silent or plant cycling https://www.fishforums.net/threads/planted-silent-cycling.470400/ Fish-in cycling...

www.fishforums.net

Both of these methods take a few weeks.

Use the cycling time to decide which fish to keep. The previous posters have mentioned the hardness of your tap water. Fish have evolved to live in hard water or soft water. If you keep soft water fish in hard water, the hardness minerals build up their organs and slowly kill them. If you keep hard water fish in soft water, they suffer mineral depletion and get sick easier.
Scottish Water make it a bit tricky to find. Load this page

Water Quality Search - Scottish Water

Water Quality Search

www.scottishwater.co.uk

Enter your postcode in the box and that will tell you your supply zone - they call it "site name"
The click/tap the 'water hardness data' box and download the pdf for 'water hardness data 2019'. This is a huge table. Look down the first column for your supply zone. Then across to two columns - hardness as mg/l CaCO3 and German degrees. Make a note of the two numbers and post them on here.


While the tank is cycling, look at fish you like on https://www.seriouslyfish.com/knowledge-base/ This tells you the hardness and pH every species needs. Some profiles use dH for hardness, some use ppm - those are the same as German degrees and mg/l CaCO3 on the pdf. The profiles also tell you the temperature they need so you can choose fish which need the same temp, and the minimum tank size.













Some screenshots to explain better how to find your hardness (I used the postcode of a bank in Glasgow)





And the hardness pdf showing the columns to look at