Aquarium keeping at home can be a wonderful hobby. A well maintained aquarium properly lit can look stunning with crystal clear water, colourful, healthy fish going about their business moving between thriving exotic plants. Aquariums are a common sight in doctors and dentists waiting rooms, this is because they are well known to provide stress relief and to have a calming effect on people.

Altenatively, if you don’t do things right from the start you will have a nightmare on your hands – cloudy water, dead fish, straggly plants etc. By making certain that you take note of the items listed below this will not happen to you.

Do Not Buy A So Called ‘Beginners Tank’

Small tanks, generally 12 to 18 inches across, are often sold as so called ‘beginners tanks’ presumably because they are easy to carry out of the shop! However it is important for you to realise that a home freshwater aquarium is basically in unstable equilibrium so you need to keep an eye on it constantly. Small aquariums are well known to be more dificult to maintain because they are not easy to achieve balance in and they go out of balasnce very rapidly. I won’t go into the details here, sufficient to say that your first tank should be somewhere around 36″ x 12″ x 18″.

Do Not Buy Tank And Fish On the Same Day

This is the worst mistake that beginners make. Before any fish enter your aquarium it needs to have been established for at least a few days, preferable a week to achieve some kind of equilibrium. You should set up your tank with everything in it except for the fish. You should leave it alone for a week. Use test strips to check the water condition and monitor its temperature and clarity during that week. Once everything has settled down add a couple of cheap fish and check that their health does not deteriorate over the next few days. Only after they look fine should you go out and buy any more fish.

Select You Fish With Care

It is a mistake to assume that all varieties of fish will live in harmony together in your community tank. You should not just take a chance on this. Unfortunately it is generally true to say that if a fish’s mouth is large enough for another fish to enter it then that will happen i.e. it is going to be a meal! Some species of fish have males that will fight to the death. In some species, males chase females all the time so in this case it is usually a good idea to give each male two or three females to ‘play’ with. Some fish are surface swimmers while others prefer to stay near the gravel. Different fish require different conditions (temperature, water ph etc), although this is not normally a major issue it should be considered. You should not buy any fish that look sickly or have split fins, always go for the lively ones that are difficult to catch. Finding a really helpful fish supplier who is willing to share his knowledge is probably the best way to go.

Do not Overfill your Tank with Fish

There are various ‘rules of thumb’ for calculating the fish capacity of your tank. Here are some of them:

• 3 cm of adult fish length per 4 litres of water (i.e., a 6 cm-long fish would need about 8 litres of water).
• 1 cm of adult fish length per 30 square centimetres of surface area.
• 1 inch of adult fish length per gallon of water.
• 1 inch of adult fish length per 12 square inches of surface area.

Do not apply any of these rules too rigorously. The young fish that you buy now are going to be much bigger in just a few months and will need more room. It is very important to take this into account. Establishing maximum capacity is often a matter of slowly adding fish and monitoring water quality over time, following a trial and error approach.

Monitor the Water and Change it Regularly

As I said before, your aquarium is delicately balanced so it is important to check the water condition regularly. You may have heard of aquarium ‘cycling’. This is what the transistion of fish waste to ammonia then nitrite by bacteria then nitrate by other bacteria is called. In the natural world this cycle generally works faultlessly without any intervention. Every week you need to change at least 25% of the aquarium water to help it along. Your fish will die if high levels of nitrate and nitrite are present in the water so it is particularly important that you check these levels regularly.

So there you have it. By following this advice you will have a troublefree start and enhance your home with a stunningly beautiful aquarium that you can be proud to show your friends.

John Thomson is an aquarium expert. For more great freshwater aquarium information, visit http://www.freshwateraquariumsecretsonline.com.