First off ... My name is nate and this page is a brief profile about me an my aquarium. I'm going to attempt to highlight how I went about building my tank and what I do to keep it up and running and what's going on.
Background
Fast forward to 6 years back ... I'm now married and for Christmas one year, my wonderful wife
buys me a 10-gallon tank with hood & stand. Of course, I can't just let the tank sit there ...
my interest in fish and tanks reawakens and I begin again. Unfortunatley, I think I know what
I'm doing at this point, while in reality, I really didn't know anything. So, I buy some gravel
and fake plants and a little castle to stick in there. And since I don't know what I'm doing, I somehow
am smart enough to not spend a lot of money on fish ... so I buy 3 zebra danios for 88¢. They lasted a while
and eventually died ... probably due to new tank syndome. Anyways, I go on buying fish and eventually the die
for about 3 years. A lot of this because I was too lazy to keep up with cleaning the tank, doing water
changes and keeping the filter fresh/clean.
So, I go through all kinds of fish: zebras, neons of various sorts, a pleco, redtail shark, some shark cats,
various bettas, goldfish, painted fish, swordtails, a kuhlii loach, and probably some more that I can't remember now.
I even tried my hand at plants and bought an anacharis ... they all died after various amounts of time ...
So, I get to the point where I've found some hardy fish which I've managed not to kill for almost a year.
I have 3 yo-yo loaches, 1 redtail shark and 3 Boesmani rainbow fish. Unfortunately, they've all
been healthy for soo long, that hey are now getting quite large for a 10-gallon tank.
... Enter my good friend Steve who is now growing out of his 55 gallon tank into a 120 gallon tank
so he can keep his African cichlids happy. And thanks to his generosity and my good fortune, I am
thus bequeathed Steve's old 55-gallon tank. Sweet! So, with his help, I get the tank all moved over.
Buy a new filter for it, new substrate, etc etc.
So, first, Steve convinces me to use this nice sand for the substrate, which I do. Then he gives me a box of all
his old tank decorations that he's not using. Now, Steve being the wise fish person that he is, runs my new
filter in his tank for a month or so before I get the 55 to get the necessary bacteria going so my tank cycle will
be little if at all. Thanks to that, we move the tank in. Set it up on the stand. Dump the sand in, fill it with water
and get it all running. So, we decide to put the 3 Yo-yo's, the redtail shark and the 3 rainbows in after the tank
settles a little bit. The filter must have been housing enough bacteria to eliminate the need to cycle the tank.
So, that's the brief history of my 55 gallon tank story (ie: 2 months now).
Continue on to read about my current setup -->.
When I grew up my mom always had one to three fish tanks running. And while I don't recall
a lot of details about them, it basically provided me a background and growing interest in fish.
I remember going to the fish stores to get fish and food and all sorts of supplies.