About 3 years, which included 2 years of lfs experience. I was out of fish for a long time due to moving around and whatnot, and only got back into it a year ago.
but I'm going to get real here going to lay it down for ya....since April 2006 on my own and we had a tank when we were kids but we didn't know what we were doing maybe 1986-1990 not sure