Yet another noob here

[David Warner]

As the title says, I am quite new. I acquired a couple of tanks at work when the person who was taking care of them before left for a new job. At the time one had a couple of small freshwater fish (I really don't know what they were) and the other had a pair of pleccos that were majorly overgrown for the tank they were in.

Well, being a noob, the small fish lasted for about three months and the pleccos for about two. Then I took the tank that had had the pleccos and put in a half dozen neon tetras and two small pleccos. The tetras lasted only a short time (I later figured out that my tap water comes out at ph 8.x and that is not good for tetras). I have no idea what I did to the pleccos but they only lasted for a couple of months also.

OK so that is where I am coming from. I have broken down the tanks and moved them to a new location with no direct sunlight (the algae was hard for me to keep on top of in an eastern window). So now I want to make another attempt at getting this right but I don't know much just yet. I guess that I am going to have to cycle new water and there seem to be enough threads in here to figure that out but I don't know what else to do.

Please throw me a clue.

 

[Fishsmurf]

You seem to have grasped the basic start up procedure so far:
1) Clean tank
2) Decorate / aquascape tank
3) Fishless cycle tanks
4) Spend spare time waiting for tanks to cycle to determine stocking and researching other fishy point's of interest
5) On completion of cycle stock tank
6) Get into maintenance regime
7) Sit back, relax and enjoy the results of your efforts
8) Decide that current number of tanks aren't enough
9) Research new tank prices
10) Buy new tank
11) Refer to point one and repeat as required

It really is as simple as that but if you have anything specific you wanna know just shout.
HTH...

And BTW welcome to AC...

 

[TKOS]

Read the stickies, very important info there.

Don't buy anymore plecos. They grow too big for small tanks. Algae is caused by excess nutrients, sunlight alone won't do it. You neons probably didn't die from the high pH but rather from ammonia poisoning in an uncycled tank.