My new aquarium - step by step

Today I'm going to write a bit about my new aquarium. It all started when we were shopping - I saw some really cool tropical fish in a pet shop. I had kept goldfish before, but I thought it would be nice to keep some tropical fish.

We did lots of aquarium-hunting, and saw that they were all mostly unreasonably priced: all of the beginners 50-70 litre sets cost about 900-1500 kr/£77-£128/€97-€161. But at the end of our hunt, we found a really nice AquaEl 54 litre set in a massive pet shop in West Stockholm that cost 500 kr/£42/€53. It came with most of the things you need: filter/aerator, heater, food and tap water conditioner. We didn't want to buy the table that was designed for this tank, it looked horribly weak and unsturdy, so we opted to go to IKEA to find a better one. We spent a few hours until the store closed, but most of the tables were either the wrong size, or not capable of holding 70 kg and cost about 1000 kr/£85/€107. But in the last minute, we found a perfectly-sized metal-frame sturdy perfect table in the bargain corner - for only 99 kr/£8.40/€10.60! We were really lucky. The next day I bought a metre of background, which according to my aquarium book, "ensures that the fish feel safe".

We then visited the pet shop again and bought 10 kg 3-5 mm pea gravel, a wooden ornament, a net, and TetraAqua SafeStart, which would let us put in the fish almost instantaneously, instead of having to do a tiring 4-8 week fishless cycle (when the tank 'installs' bacteria to eat up the nasty toxic ammonia/nitrite made by the fish). Cleaning the gravel was a laborious process, but at the end we were very pleased, and a few days later we headed off to the pet shop again to finally get the fish and plants!

We got to the shop and we bought four different plants, three male colourful guppies and three swordtails; one male, one female and one baby! We settled them into the tank, and now, 5 days on they are very lively, happy and they have very hungry appetites!


In the near future we plan to get two bottom-dwelling Three-stripe Cories. They're really nice, have a look:

We're having lots of fun with our community tank! It's really peaceful and relaxing to watch!! It might be hard work, but it's really worth it and rewarding in the end!