This is our aquarium. 55 gallon freshwater. Current stock of fish is



Anyone else in the hobby?

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Nice. I wouldn't call it a hobby but I've had a fresh-water tank the majority of my life. We have some sort of self-sustaining swordtail/molly crossbred population. they won't die despite my family's lack of innerest.

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How do you keep them from getting the ick?

Have a big tank but it’s in process of being torn down to restart. Will move current inhabitants to “fish room” in basement which is basically some shelves and tanks that are empty from when I had my discus tank.

I have always kind of wanted one. A friend of my moms had one when I was a kid and I would always love to go over there and watch the fish.

But I feel like it is probably a lot of work and money, so I have always withheld

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Freshwater is fairly easy. You could probably get set up nice for $200. Frustrating at first getting the tank going. You'll lose some fish for a month or two. Once you get things stabilized, assuming you have some hearty varieties, its pretty simple. Maybe 30 minutes/ month to do a cleaning.

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So a medium sized tank is easier to care for than a small one as your margin of error is bigger. But some fish are a pain. My big tank I 8x2.5x2.5. It was easy until I got stupid.

Its typically an ailment of stressed fish in an inappropriate environment. Ick is present in almost every aquarium but the fish immune system fights it off. If the fish is stressed due to improper Ph, temperature, high nitrates, nitrites, or ammonia it will have a depressed immune system and may fall victim to this.
Ick is a parasite. It is typically suspended in the water.
All that being said, I have a UV sterilizer that runs 24/7. It will kill pathogens in the water column and reduce the chances of a breakout.
All other water parameters are closely monitored. I spend about 30 minutes a week doing water tests.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
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Most authorities recommend fishless cycling to prepare your tank with beneficial nitrifying bacteria. Fish in cycle are a thing of the past. That being said, i successfully did a fish in cycle with zero losses by stocking very, very slowly and using all live plants.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
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I have successfully had both freshwater and saltwater aquariums. Not in the last 15 years or so. I imagine sea salt mixes and all hosts of support equipment have vastly improved.

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Filters are better. Sea salt is sea salt

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
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That's a very nice setup. A long time ago I had a 55 gallon fresh-water tank at home, and it was very nice, it always got compliments from visitors, but you really have to be on the ball keeping it nice and clean and keeping the ph right and all that. As nice a feature as a well-cared for tank is, a neglected tank is a real turn-off and it doesn't take long to go there. Our tank never got neglected, but once we had kids and I started working more hours and i started having to make choices about what hobbies to keep and what to drop, the tank had to go. Now that our kids are grown, seeing this post makes me want to dabble in it again. I like the "real plants" angle. I always used fake stuff, are the real plants totally easy to deal with or do they have their own set of problems?

I assumed they just got a bit better in the quality of mix, minerals etc. UV filtration and other things I am sure fun things to throw money at to make things easier. Or at least make you feel better about the water as you place a $75 fish in.

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If I get a tank can I hire someone to maintain it?

Ok so plants. This may be tldr so proceed at your own risk.
Plastic plants are detrimental to most fish. This is due to their texture. They can get torn fins and damaged scales from them. They're no longer recommended.
Silk plants are a better artificial alternative.
Live plants have a lot of benefits. They use nitrogen wastes from the fish as fertilizers (ammonia, nitrites and nitrates, if theres questions of the nitrogen cycle I will address that). So eventually in a balanced aquarium you will find increasing levels of nitrates. The onmy way to remove these is with water changes and metabolic consumption by live plants.
Are they hard? Depends on the plants. I have java moss ( that's the stuff on the middle trees and the UFO on the bottom mid left) windelov java fern (front left and right) anubia (spade shaped leaves on mid back left) and another strain of java fern in the back left. The moss is fairly fast growing. Originally i had a baseball sized clump that I put on the driftwood trees and it grew into that in a month, and I now harvest a baseball size clump in trimmings every month or so. I gave away as much as I could to friends with aquariums but now I got so much i either toss it or give it to my fish store in exchange for a buck or two off purchases.
These are low light requiring plants and thusly work well in this aquarium. I use an automatic led light with sunrise, sunset, night and mid day siesta times programmed in to reduce algae growth.
As far as algae goes, planted aquariums have considerably less algae because the plants outcompete algae for nutrients.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
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There used to be expensive places that would come do that. Usually for offices.

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Darko's tank is pretty sweet. AJ LOVED sitting and watching the fishies. He was mesmerized by them.

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I went with real plants for a couple years and for whatever reason it made things more difficult. Had to change water quite a bit more. I think there is a problem in that the optimal temperatures for nice fish and nice plants are not the same.

Oh and not quite on same page with Darko...you need to have the lights on more to keep the plants alive but that leads to more algae.

I think it depends how much time you want to spend on it. Like I said I allocate 30 minutes/month tops.

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Plenty of services for that I’m burbs.

Oh yes. I used to do that myself. I did doctors offices, dentists offices, shit like that. There are many services. That being said... a 55 gallon freshwater setup takes an hour a week of maintenance once you're set up. Once a quarter you might spend an extra hour cleaning a canister filter. Its actually kind of fun in my opinion.
You have micro dudes right? Teaching microdudes about chemistry with the water chemistry testing is educational.
Also, with microdudes, there is a nice life lesson on the circle of life. We watch live fish being born. We've seen baby fish get eaten. We've had a couple losses. This is the way of things and a valuable lesson.

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awesome info. thanks.

That would depend on the plants and the temperature of the lights you use. Most low light plants like the ferns, anubia, and moss prefer low levels of lights (8 hours) with a 2 hour "siesta" (mid day break in the light) which also keeps algae growth down.
When considering light intensity (PAR) and temperature, you will find that low light levels with my species are appropriate. My plants are thriving.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
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Since it's fun would you do it for me for free?

interesting. Can you get away with changing the water a little at a time, say a few gallongs on a weekly basis, so it isn't as shocking to the fish, or do you have to do a more significant water change?

Well driving isnt fun. That said I'd help with initial setup and teach y'all how to do the maintenance.
I know you're joking, but maintenance is a way of having family time and when you're done and you look at your clean, pretty setup and happy fish, there is a nice sense of accomplishment.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
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Typically... typically, an average water change is about 20% a week. This depends on your filtration, animal stocking levels, and plant stocking levels. The best way to monitor your water change requirement is by testing for nitrates in a properly cycled aquarium. This isn't to say that you should no longer test for ammonia and nitrites. You want to keep 0 ppm ammonia, 0 ppm nitrites, and current wisdom recommends less than 40 ppm nitrates.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
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The old rule of thumb was never more than 1/3 of the tank at once. 25% is probably better. You use a siphon to suck out the muck off the bottom so sometimes its hard to do less than that.

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You can do more if you want.. guys with large fish will do as much as 80% at a time. There is math involved that shows why you want to do this but these guys will also do 3 a week. When I had my ome tank set up it was 350 gallo s of water upstairs hooked up to a 120 gallon sump in basement. I actually consistently added water to the sump and every day would shut pumps off for a seconds that would than siphon the sump down to about 25 gallons of water. I’m trying to remember if it filled fast enough to auto siphon or not. This system worked great for when I was setting tank up,and it was mainly smaller fish as nitrates stayed extremely low.

On the other hand, when i switched to the planted discus tank it was a harder as the plants were a higher light requiring variety to deal high tank temps and had to be dosed with minerals. It was a pain in my ass even if at peak tank it was beautiful. After a couple years of that and a 3 year old killing all my fish I switched it up to a South American cichlids tank that just needed more water flow than this system provided so I changed to a canister system.. still not enough and I’m going to tear it down and go back to original in a community setting vs a specialized.

Please use caution when changing water. You need to make sure you've used a dechlorinator/conditioner to remove chlorine from city water supplies. Some city water uses chloramine which will release ammonia as the chlorine evaporates are is removed with a binding agent in the conditioner.
Chlorine will kill fish quickly.
You will want to try your best to match temperature too. I usually leave two 5 gallon jugs out to get to room temp. I keep the tank at 76, so I'll add about 2.5 gallons at a time and let the heater do its thing. This is more of a winter problem though. I'm averaging 20% water changes a week.
I use a gravel siphon and dump water into a 5 gallon jug so I know I'm removing precisely 10 gallons and adding 10 gallons, with some fudge factor for evaporation.
There is no reason you couldn't change higher percentage of water, in fact if you're not properly cycled (nitrogen cycle) you may have to. The old school of thought was that you're harming the colonies of beneficial nitrifying bacteria but we know now that there is very little of this bacteria in the water column and largely in the filter with smaller percentages on the surfaces in the aquarium. The most problematic part of large water changes is maintaining stable parameters, temp and ph, gh being the most likely parameters to shift too quickly.
I keep my ph buffered with crushed coral in mesh bags in my canister filter. It's almost always right at 7.8 no matter what I do. Coral is quite fascinating.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014