Setting Up a Saltwater Fish Tank

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Eric with the World Of Wet Pets Tropical Fish in Portland, Oregon and I'm here to demonstrate how to setup a salt water aquarium. For our demonstration, we're, we're going to use Oceanic's bio cube, it's one of the small self, self-contain aquariums. This one is an eight gallon tank but it has a lot of the things that larger tanks would have as well. You can buy components and go separately; but this has a few things built into it; most notably, the lighting. This is going to have compact fluorescent lighting built in. This would be ready for many of your small reef animals as well; corals and the like. It also has built in lunar light that will give you your nocturnal moonlight effect. The small cube tanks have their filtration built right into the back. The water flows right into the back through a pre-filter; generally through a biological filter and into a side that has a sump. It send pump back into the tank to recirculate. This work very very well. To this system we're going to add a heater; small submersible heater that will go into the inside; stays out of the way. More tropical fish tend to be like in the mid upper seventy degrees; so we'll be adding the heater. When we mix up our water, when we start the tank, we can mix it up right in the tank. We will use a hydrometer to measure our salt, salt levels. We will need a salt, something like Instant Ocean or any of the, the commercial salt mixes will do just fine. Once it is up and, and we've established the correct amount of salt; generally a cup for two gallons, then we will check the pH; we can buffer the pH with our additives something like a marine buffer. We can add other additives, calcium and, and things depending on what we need to get it ready for animals. We'll generally add a sub-straight; something like Aragonite, that's the big bag back here. That's for the flooring; basically the sound; it will also help to buffer and then we're ready to go. We generally give the tank about twenty four to forty eight hours of running with stability; that means a stable salinity level and a stable temperature before we add our first animals."