27 gallon tub or aquarium (20 gallon LONG is best, don’t get the tall one)
Ehiem heater 78 degrees is sweet spot, 82 if you want to speed up their metabolism, the higher the temp the lower the oxygen. Fish can survive at 90 degrees if oxygen is supplemented with 100% surface agitation so must agitate surface so it looks like a stream instead of a still pond on the surface.
You can agitate the surface with either and air pump or water pump I prefer air, but water pump has advantages.
Sponge filter (they put weights in bottom and sometimes they leech metal best to take the weight away) make it stay down with rock not metal but if you are just starting out its fine, 10 years in though change the weight.
Glass top if aquarium – For slowing evaporation and making sure fish don’t jump out.
More frequent top off on a tub without glass top so put tape or a mark to know the 35ppm point.
Food – Diversify
If you cant diversify then TDO
If you can then add frozen nano reef frenzy
Clean Up Crew
Trochus snails can flip over so more expensive than snails that cant flip over which will rot in the water when they get stuck on their back.
So you also need hermit crabs to eat the rotting snail
and then you need copepods to eat what the crabs dropped on the floor.
Many copepods, I like the big whitish ones and the little red ones
Spring Water for top off
If your tank is 100% algae then get so many turbo snails that are so big that at night they sleep along the edges of the rectangle and take up around 30% of the edge. Once the turbo snails finish you gotta take them back to the store or they will perish because no more algae to eat.
Aptasia is cool, not a pest. Sucks up nitrate from the fish waste and uses it as energy and stores the nitrate so can be removed from the fish tank like the same way when you grow macro algae and remove it from the tank you are removing nitrate. The macro algae absorbs from the water column and the Aptasia absorbs from particles in the water column.
People try to have aptasia free tanks as a sign of perfect tank but aptasia is not a pest.
When you are ready to make your own water you should get a heater 78 degrees, and a water pump, my trick is to buy a big filter sock and I put the pump in it and that collects all the brown.
