Newbie with a Fresh Water tank

[TBear]

Hey, so just recently bought a tank, it’s a 37 gallon tall tank. I have heater, air pump, topfin 40 filter, two live lowlight plants, a fake decora rock, gravel substrate, two kissing gourami, 2 gold gourami, 3 Chinese algae eaters, and my other smaller tank is a 20 gallon, with 3 platys, 2 guppys, and 2 guppy fry. The 20 gallon been there over a month now so it’s doing well. In the early stages lost two molly, so was distressed about that, and got a bigger tank to do a better job. I have both tanks running now, the 20 gallon tank is doing fine, Fish are eating well, and pooping fine. The 37 gallon, my kissers are fine same with the AEs, but one of the golden gouramis is always on bottom of tank unless I come by than it swims normal, and had a clear long Pooh string that came off of it earlier today. Any suggestions for me and just caring for them, also what more to add would be great e.g shrimp etc. My water parameters are fine, I have a master test kit, and the 37 gallon was only not cycled enough. But ammonia and everything else was within parameters of being safe.

 

[FreshyFresh]

Welcome and a nice sounding setup you have. 37's are cool, but arm soakers for sure (they're so deep) and difficult for plants given the distance between light and substrate. You can get around this by having them up high, stuck to driftwood, etc..

I see that you have several questions going in various threads.. There's a lot going on here. You have a liquid test kit, so that's a great thing. I'd do daily water changes on it and monitor for ammonia every day or so until you are sure the tank produces nothing but nitrates. This will take a good 6 weeks. You can speed it up by adding seeded media from a healthy established tank. Your one month old tank is not established enough. As you've probably read, you then typically do a large weekly water change so that nitrates don't exceed ~20ppm by day 7.

The stocking you have is not appropriate for this size tank. Average kissing gourami size when kept in an aquarium is 10". Chinese algea eaters can get 12" and all gourami don't really care to have other gourami in with them. You can have combos of them that work, but it's not easy. If this were my tank and I had to keep some of what you have, I'd keep one kisser and rehome everything else. Kissers will easily tolerate anything smaller than them, but will typically not tolerate anything of similar size of larger. If the kisser works out, add a few tetras, danios or platys, etc.

 

[the loach]

The "Chinese" algae eater (Gyrinocheilus aymonieri) isn't going to get 12". It will get to 6" though. But more importantly, 1 of them is going to kill the other 2 long before that because they are very territorial amongst their own species.
If you put some pictures up we can probably give some more tips.

 

[TBear]

Thanks for the advice, it’s funny, what I did is I got two kissing gouramis and two golden gouramis, the gold ones are smaller than the kissing ones, and for some reason they all get along ok. The Chinese algae eaters were recommended in community tanks by my lfs, so maybe they had low knowledge of them?

Also, I’m happy to see you already knew how deep my tank is, haha, good knowledge right there. My plan is actually to wait for the Fish in my 37 g get bigger than invest in an 55-90 gallon tank. So, I started with the 20 gallon, got the 37 gallon, and once I upgrade again, I’m going to use the 20 gallon for QT, the 37 gallon for marine( don’t want to invest too much in salt and whatnot) and obviously the bigger tank for bigger fresh water fish. And daily or every other day WC is fine? If I miss let’s say every day and do every other day?

 

[TBear]

 

[TBear]

I separated my live plant and put on right as to get more light, and ApparAntly it grows tall than arches down to the gravel again afterwards?

 

[TBear]

I’m going to downtown Toronto for a family day out with my kids and wife, but I’ll test the water when I’m back and post photos of results from both tanks, thanks for the support

 

[TBear]

And my Chinese algae eaters hide in the rock decoration, so hard to catch pictures of all 3. Lol. And ignore the cichlid, that was my original idea to buy until I found out there are too aggressive.

 

[TBear]

Oh, and my tap water is filtered out for chemicals and metals, chlorine they said they remove about 97%, how do I adjust the conditioner dosage according to this, or stick to the same instructions for them?

 

[the loach]

Good news: that aren't Chinese algae eaters but Siamese algae eaters (Crossocheilus siamensis) they aren't going to kill each other (still will grow to 5-6 inches)
The tanks seem well lit I would recommend getting live plants, that is much better for the water quality and fish.