You Should Ask Yourself Before Starting A Freshwater Aquarium

freshwater aquarium

A freshwater aquarium is a great stress relieverwill ,it will make your home or office look better and it is also a good conversation piece.

Here is some information you need if you want to start a freshwater aquarium.

Does a freshwater tank need a lot of work to support?

Weekly I spend maybe an hour to an hour and a half keeping my freshwater tank clean and feeding my fish. Most of my time is spent to clean the debris, fish waste and replacing 10% of the water in the tank.

How big of a tank should I start with?

My advice is to start with a large tank such as 29-gallons or higher.The reason is that if your chemistry starts going south, a larger tank is more forgiving than a small tank. A large tank will give smaller chemistry changes that you can catch and adjust. A small tank may not give you the time to correct before your fish are sick or dead.

Is it hard to keep up the chemistry in the tank?

If you do the your research, you will find that conserving the proper chemistry in your freshwater aquarium is real easy. Most of the chemistry control is performed by the live bacteria and plants.

You do have to measure pH, ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels periodically, but ammonia and nitrite is controlled by your bacteria colony so should not get out of specification. Your biggest problem will be maintaining nitrate levels low. But if you do not over feed your fish and have plenty of live plants, this will not be a problem.

Is a freshwater tank expensive?

The most expensive part I found was the tank and the stand. In total once I had it up and running I had an initial cost of about 750 dollars including the substrate, plants, aerator, lighting, decorations and fish.

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