First of all I'll introduce myself, I've been reading your forums for a little while now trying to gather as much information as possible. I am a college student living in Iowa (could you have guessed?) and I haven't kept fish for over five years, but often had a tank when I was younger.
The Tank:
So I had been planning on getting back into fish keeping for some time and I had started hunting for a good tank. I happened across a 58 gallon used tank at a garage sale and picked it up for $50. It's called a 50 gallon show tank? Which apparently has something to do with it being deeper (I think it's the same dimensions height and width as a 50 gallon).
So obviously there was some work to be done here, but I put in a few hours of elbow grease, took out all the old rock, and cleaned everything that came with it. It's got a Penguin 300 hang on the back filter and he had a bag of new filter pads, I was going to take it to the LFS today to see what other filter media I should put in it. I know that I dumped out some white pellets from some baskets so I'll need to replace that, and I have no idea whether or not I'll need to replace the round filters that roll near the water run-off I don't know what these are called. Hopefully that filter is good enough for that size tank?
So the tank is looking better and you may notice a little bit of water in the bottom which I'm happy to say is attributed to a successfull water test I ran last night for a few hours, looks like it works fine. It also came with a 115V 200W Visitherm heater is this enough to heat that size tank what would you recommend? Basically now all my questions involve setting this tank up as far as what you all might recommend. I want to get it cycling right away so I need to figure out what substrate I want to put in it even though I'm not sure of fish yet. One idea I had is that the guy that owned it previously used a lot of live plants hence the double light hoods, and since I don't need that much light I was thinking about putting regular lights in one and some black lights in the other so you could alternate between them. Then using white and black substrate and some other white decoration to get it all to glow under the black lights would this work? I also cleaned that tank with bleach water what's the best way to get it rinsed out? When the tank is set up it's going to be in the middle of the room so people will be able to look through it for the most part I know the filter and some cords will have to hang out the back. Anyways thanks for your input I've got some more questions but I need to get going right now so I'll leave you with this. Thanks again for all your help!
