My New Project For The Living Room

So I have put some considerable thought into something that I could do for a past time at home. After many hours of pondering and looking around at different things I decided to start my own fresh water aquarium!

So from here on out I am going to keep updating my blogs with new additions to my aquarium and the problems that I encounter in hopes of inspiring you to do something for your self that you will enjoy.

I started by purchasing a 55 gallon aquarium from a local person off of Craigslist, I will tell you that you need to shop around because the big box stores are not always the cheapest but may be the best quality. I was lucky enough to find a brand new aquarium for almost half price.

I figured that there would be some learning involved in starting an aquarium but little did I know there was a lot more to it than I thought. Its not as simple as fill it up put the fish in and watch them swim. You have to find habitats for them to hide in you have have your bottom layer of gravel or sand and it all has to be set up and filtered for at least 2 days before you can add any kind of live fish in it. I will say that the water in these parts takes some time to get set with the right pH levels and such.

Next you have to pick out what kind of tank you are going to have, a community fish tank where most of the fish you have are in schools and are nice, a semi aggressive tank in which some of the fish are schooling fish and some are not or do you want a Schilid tank where you can have 1 or 2 fish that will eat anything that will go in their mouth.

I chose to go with a semi aggressive tank so that I could have both color and schooling fish along with some of the cool looking fresh water fish out there. The general rule of thumb is 1" of a grown fish per gallon of water in the tank. This means that if you have a 10 gallon tank when your fish are full grown you need to have no more than 10" of total fish length in the tank, 20 gallon=20" of fish, 55 gallon=55inches of grown fish.

My tank now consists of the following fish for now and as I add more to it and learn a new lesson I will write another blog about it.

3 Tiger Barbs: These are a schooling fish and are about 1" right now. They will grow up to be about 3" apiece.

2 Redtail Sharks: These are a very beautiful fish and are about 1" right now and should grow up to 4" apiece. They are a territorial fish and like to be the boss of the tank. There is one pictured above with the Tiger Barbs.

2 Bala Sharks: These are beautiful silver fresh water "sharks" and right now are about 2". These creatures are very active and control the bottom layer of the tank and can grow to be about 1' 4" when full grown.

Start your own aquarium after you have asked lots of questions and have decided how much money you would like to spend because they can become a very expensive hobby. None the less though it is a very relaxing experience to sit at home at night and watch you fish tank while you wind down for the evening.