Basic Freshwater Aquarium Setup Tips

Freshwater Aquarium

If you've decided to set up a freshwater aquarium, you want to consider some of the basic tips I'm about to outline below. First, you'll need to understand that with freshwater aquariums you can create a community tank, but you can't mix tropical fish with coldwater fish due to their obvious environmental differences. IE. the temperature of the water. But, you can put one or the other within the tank.

You'll want to choose between a glass, acrylic glass, or acrylic, as the aquarium. Usually, larger enclosures are made of glass, whereas smaller aquariums tend to be acrylic or an acrylic glass.

Typical freshwater aquarium fish include goldfish, cichlids, tetras, mollies, platies, and various other community fish. Make sure that you know which fish are compatible before you mix community and aggressive or community and semi-aggressive fish.You must know first the list of community, aggressive and semi-aggressive fishes.

Setting up an Aquarium

Location

You want the aquarium to be in an area where you'll be able to enjoy it; plus the fish will get used to seeing you, so they will not shy away when you get close to the tank.

You want to make sure that the aquarium is on a solid support, such as a table or stand, and you want to avoid direct sunlight, as this will increase green algae growth during summer months.

Setting up the Aquarium

You want to rinse out the aquarium, the gravel, and all the decor and plants before you start to fill up the tank. You want to remove all dust, dirt, and debri from everything you plan on putting inside the tank. You can put the gravel in a large bucket, pour the bucket with water, stir the gravel around a bit, dump the water, refill, stir, and dump the water back out.

When you go to fill up the tank, you want to carefully pour in the gravel, place larger decor in the tank, and add any plants. You want to put taller plants towards the back of the tank and shorter plants near the front. Go ahead and set up the filter and heater, but do not plug anything in.

When you're ready to pour in the tap water, make sure that the water is room temperature. You may want to put a shallow bowl in the center of the tank so that when you pour the water into the tank, the stream will not displace your gravel or decor. When the water fills about an inch or so above the gravel, you can remove the bowl.

Once the aquarium is completely filled with tap water, plug in your heater so that it can acclimate the water to about 78F, if you plan on keeping tropical fish in your aquarium. Also, go ahead and plug in the filter so that it can start filtering the water.

Add all your water treatments to the tap water so that the chlorine is removed and the good bacteria starts to build up in the tank.

Add the light, and you're done. Let the tank sit for at least 48 hours before you add any fish. It's actually better if you want 5-7 days before adding fish so that the good bacteria and the tank can full acclimate.

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