i currently have an empty 10 gallon tank that i want to set up to house a single fancy goldfish. what would be the ideal setup, in regards to filters, heater, all that stuff?
i want to do everything to give my future fish a great home!

Hi and welcome!!!


I have a 10g housing an oranda. Here's my set up:

150 penguin biowheel filter (you want a filter that circulates at least 100 gallons of water per hour)
50 watt visa therm stealth submersible heater
coral life thermometer
rena 100 air pump connected to 4" bubble wand
gravel and a few plants/ornaments

Items for water quality include:
dechlorinator such as Prime
water test kits for ammonia, nitrItes, nitrAtes, pH, KH and gH
gravel vacuum
separate buckets for dirty and clean water

Remember that 10g really isn't a whole lot of space. So don't overload it with ornaments and gravel. It's in my son's room, so it's the perfect size.

Also remember that a new tank setup will go through a cycle:
http://www.kokosgoldfish.com/cycle.html

Here is an excellent link on a fishless cycle:
http://www.kokosgoldfish.com/FishlessCycle.html


Good luck and have fun with it!

Wow - you really covered it all, Gia!!!!

I think I would go so far as to recommend NO gravel. Run the tank bare bottom. This will increase the water volume that will go in that tank, and allow you to keep it far cleaner. Less waste means less that must be processed int eh cycle, as well as less nitrate in the end.....

Youcan still add a few pretty stones or plants or whatever. The tank will look lovely and the fish will be happy.

A Penguin 150 is just exactly the right gph for the tank. But it has (unless they redesigned it and I missed it! - entirely possible) only the biowheel for the cycle platform. Biowheels seem to take a bit longer to colonate in a cycle, and, I feel, do not hold quite enough for a messy goldie. The 150 has no place for any extra biomedia to be stuffed in the thing. I have slit open the blue cartridges of the 150's I have and banged all the carbon out of the things. I then poured in biomedia into the blue cartridge so that there is still more area for the beneficial bacteria to colonate.

This makes it a bit difficult to clean the filters - I like to blast them clean under the faucet in the utility room and I cannot blast the biomedia, but active swishing and rubbing in used water does the trick. I have, on occasion, emptied the media into a bowl, blasted the blue floss and poured the media back in.

You can also or instead, drop a baggie of media behind some plants in your tank. This will work quite well, just not quite as well as having it in the filter....

Hi there,

You're question is great! If I had the foresight to ask it, I may have saved a few fishies ;(

I have a biowheel 200 and it has room for extra media, it's very quiet and I have it on one side of the tank with an airstone so fishies have the left side to rest and snooze.

Good luck, you have some great advice in the previous posts. Both Daryl and Chico are very helpful (thanks guys!)

S~

thanks a bunch guys! i can't wait to get started! i kind of jumped into things last time and ended up with some dead fish.

I was answering all kinds of things - and I was very ill....

Now I am going around cleaning up my messes I made.....

Sorry Laura.....

well, i went ahead and got the penguin 150!
would it be a good idea to get a sponge filter as well, just to get a little extra biological filtration going on?