My First 20g Tank.

Hey everyone! Just wanted to share my first real foray into the fish world. A family member bought a 3.5 gallon tank and a betta for my 5 yo about a year ago. He loves his fish and named him T-rex.

Recently, I decided that I wanted to delve further into the fish world, so I invested into what I ORIGINALLY thought was a large tank. I found out that a 20 gallon tank is actually quite small lol. Anyways, I'm still learning the ropes and am excited to finish out our new addition. It's been up and running and still working through cycling for about 3 weeks now. Currently, we have 3 fancy guppies, a Glofish danio, and one other fish that I can't recall what he is. Maybe someone on here can help with the identification.

I just thought I'd share my new setup and look forward to the advice you all can give in keeping our new family members happy and healthy. I've attached a picture of our tank, as well as a picture of the one I can't identify. He's the bluish one.

 

Hello and welcome! To me it looks like you have two glofish danios, just different colors. Do you have two air stones instead of a filter? The one on the left reminds me of Mount Wannahockalougie from Finding Nemo

 

Flyingjunkie , welcome to the forum.

Our first tank was a 20 gallon set up a year and a half ago. Still up and running and have added some more tanks since then.

Although I don't have glofish in my 20, my larger tank has about a dozen of the glofish tetras. They have been very hardy and grown in size. A couple of those would be a good addition.

Do you have a blue LED also?

I think we have the same tall coral ornament on our 20g's. My clown plecos like going in there and the other fish will come in and out as well.

Only suggestions I have is to invest in an API Master Freshwater test kit. Look online, they should be around $16-$19 and good for 800 tests. The strips are less, but they are not cost effective when you get 20 strips for $10 vs the 800 tests of the API kit.

Also, with the gravel, ensure you use a siphon gravel vac for water changes. You will be surprised how much uneaten food, muck and fish waste ends up in the gravel!

 

Hello and welcome! To me it looks like you have two glofish danios, just different colors. Do you have two air stones instead of a filter? The one on the left reminds me of Mount Wannahockalougie from Finding Nemo

I have 2 air stones and a Marineland Penguin 150 filter. And Mount Wannahockaloogie is what inspired me lol.

And the blue one being another Glofish Danio makes sense. I was led astray by the master fish tank experts at Petsmart (a lesson I quickly learned the hard way). I have another post in a different thread detailing my experience with them.

 

Flyingjunkie , welcome to the forum.

Our first tank was a 20 gallon set up a year and a half ago. Still up and running and have added some more tanks since then.

Although I don't have glofish in my 20, my larger tank has about a dozen of the glofish tetras. They have been very hardy and grown in size. A couple of those would be a good addition.

Do you have a blue LED also?

I think we have the same tall coral ornament on our 20g's. My clown plecos like going in there and the other fish will come in and out as well.

Only suggestions I have is to invest in an API Master Freshwater test kit. Look online, they should be around $16-$19 and good for 800 tests. The strips are less, but they are not cost effective when you get 20 strips for $10 vs the 800 tests of the API kit.

Also, with the gravel, ensure you use a siphon gravel vac for water changes. You will be surprised how much uneaten food, muck and fish waste ends up in the gravel!

I originally had 4 other Glofish in there, but they died because Petsmart told me 2 days was long enough to cycle my tank if I used Tetra AquaSafe and SafeStart (a lesson learned the hard way). My tank does have a blue LED that I usually turn on after the sun goes down in the evening. I've already got the API test kit and a gravel siphon. I've been trying to make sure that I have everything I need to keep everything up to snuff. I did want to get a Pleco, or something similar at some point, but I was told by an actual aquarium store owner to wait a few more weeks. I also want a few more danios to make sure everyone has friends since the fish I currently have are schooling fish.

 

If you get a pleco, the rubber nose and clown pleco grow 4" - 6" max.

My 10 gallon and 20 gallon tanks use mechanical timers from Amazon (2-pack for $10) to control the lights.

If your blue lights are integrated into the white lights and you want blue lights on a timer, try adding the Mingdak submersible blue LED lights from Amazon.

I have 2 different LED's from Mingdak and they have worked well.

 

Looks nice! I'm currently looking into re-aquascaping my 20 gallon and 10g. I was trying to grow live plants and it hasn't worked so well, so I'm gonna keep the one live plant that has lived and gonna get some nice, easy artificial stuff! I have one really nice stone piece and a few nice driftwood pieces that i'm gonna incorporate. But I am cruising these threads looking for inspiration. Oh, yeah! Welcome to Fishlore!

 

Looks nice! I'm currently looking into re-aquascaping my 20 gallon and 10g. I was trying to grow live plants and it hasn't worked so well, so I'm gonna keep the one live plant that has lived and gonna get some nice, easy artificial stuff! I have one really nice stone piece and a few nice driftwood pieces that i'm gonna incorporate. But I am cruising these threads looking for inspiration. Oh, yeah! Welcome to Fishlore!

Thanks for the warm welcome! I would eventually like to do live plants, but I want to take things one step at a time. I want to make sure that I can get my tank up and running and stocked with the fish I want before I try to complicate it by adding live plants into the mix. I'm going to stick with my artificial ones for now and see how that goes. I'm having a lot of fun learning about this and am looking forward to furthering my knowledge.

 

Update on my tank:

Ammonia: 0 ppm
Nitrite: 0 ppm
Nitrate: 20 ppm

My fish from PetSmart are all dead except one. My Fancy guppy from them is still alive. I've started getting my fish from an EXTREMELY reputable Aquarium store here in Pittsburgh. The store, Aqua World, actually provided the install, fish, and supplies when the guys from Tanked (ATM) did Antonio Brown's tank. Everything seems to be thriving. I've even got babies in my tank now! I didn't think they would breed so quickly, but I found them by accident while doing my weekly water change. I'm really excited about this!

 

I got my last few fish to finish off my tank! I got a neon dwarf gourami, and 2 German rams. I think that's all I'm going to be putting in there. I already had 7 fancy guppies and 3 platies. Plus, one of my guppies had some fry about 2 weeks ago. I think three's 4-6 of then in there. I don't plan on removing them. Everyone seems happy right now. I'm watching ammonia levels to make sure there are no spikes.