Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)
Hi,
John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.
I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.
With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.
I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.
If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.
I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.
I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.
Thank you
Darragh Sherwin
Help with new tank
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Congratulations on your new purchase and welcome to the forum !
As far as timing for lights is concerned, it depends whether you have real plants in the tank or not. From the picture (nice tank - I like the strawberry planter type decoration in the middle
), I think they are artificial ones. The only 'risk' is that, if you have long hours of lighting, algae starts developing in the tank. I'd say 5 or 6 hours a day should be ok but it's more or less a case of trial and error as it also depends on the amount of surrounding light in the room.For the length of time needed before you start adding fish, there is a lot of info available on this forum. Basically, you need to cycle the tank before adding any quantity of fish, so that the beneficial bacteria transforming the ammonia (fish and food waste) into nitrite and then into nitrate. Once the levels of both ammonia and nitrite are down to zero, it is safe for the fish. You can check these levels with test kits that are available for purchase in any of the LFS's mentioned on this site.
Do you know which type of fish you want to add to your tank when it's ready ?
I hope this helps.
Valerie
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