How to Set Up a Tropical Fish Tank

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Michael. Today we're going to talk about how to set up a tropical fish tank. One of the most important things about setting your tank up is where you're going to place it in your home. You want to make sure that you do not place it in direct sunlight, too much sun on your tank is going to grow a lot of green algae in your tank. The other thing you want to look at is the size of the tank that you are using. This particular tank is a 16 gallon tank so I'm going to need to buy enough gravel for a 16 gallon tank. General rule of thumb is you to want to buy 1pound of gravel per gallon. So I'll be purchasing 16 pounds of gravel for this particular tank. Filtration is also very important. I like to use something that filters a little bit more water. I have a 16 gallon here, I'm going to actually use a filter for up to 30 gallons. I get a little better flow rate per hour and I'm going to filter more. It gives me the opportunity to put a little few extra fish into the tank then you normally would in a 16 gallon. The other thing that's very important are the chemicals. Check with your local shop, find out what particular chemicals are best for your area. Each local municipality has different water conditions and what they're adding to our water. Here we use ammonia detox and ammonia detox neutralizes ammonia, it gets the chlorines out and it carries your chloramines as well. All of those things are important for the proper health of your fish. The other thing that's very important in a brand new tank is to set up that bacteria. We don't have any beneficial in it. A product like EcoStart puts that beneficial bacteria into your tank that bacteria is going to help remove naturally some of your nitrates, nitrites, and your ammonias. And another thing that's very important is also and I recommend is aquarium salt. Aquarium salt reduces the stress on your fish, raises electrolytes in your tank which is also going to cut down on disease. Now once we have all of our supplies together and we're going to set this tank up, we want to make sure that we rinse our gravel. I use a kitchen colander and I make sure all my gravel is rinsed really well then I place my gravel into my tank, set all of my ornaments up and then start to fill it up. Follow the directions that are on your chemicals it'll tell you how much you need to put into your tank. Set all your chemicals up, get your filter running, and then we can start working on placing, putting fish into your tank. My name is Michael and we talked about how to set up a tropical fish tank."