Don t Make These Beginner Mistakes in Your Aquarium

So I've been in the hobby for a long time now and I've been in here for long enough to have made way more mistakes than I thought I was ever gonna make when I first started out keeping fish. And today I'm gonna be talking about the 10 most common mistakes made by fish keepers. So I think I've done every single one of these. I might even still be making some of these mistakes. To this day, fish keeping is a hobby all about mistakes. It is perfectly fine to be making mistakes. I tell my team this all the time. Mistakes are normal. We can't always get everything perfect, but what's important is that we learn from those mistakes. And this video is gonna be all about giving you guys a little bit of prior warning. Sometimes it's better to learn from someone else's mistakes. So definitely stay around for the entire list. If you are an experienced aquarist or a beginner, this video is gonna be useful for you. Let's get into the first mistake. The first mistake that I always see people making, especially with owning a store, is not cycling your tank properly. Now, this is something that I think is a little bit hard for beginners to understand. And even some experienced aquarists still run into this issue with tanks not being cycled properly. So when you set up a new aquarium, it is completely inert. Especially if you add town water and just treat it with a dechlorinator, there is absolutely no ecological stuff really happening in there. And keeping an aquarium is all about understanding the nitrogen cycle, pretty much. Your aquarium is a constant ecosystem and you are trying to nurture the balance of nature within a glass box. Understanding the nitrogen cycle is very important. So in a very quick summary, fish poop, the poop starts to decompose, creating ammonia. This has then formed the bacteria in your filters and in your substrate and pretty much on every single surface in your aquarium. Then converts this chemical into nitrites. And plants can use the nitrites. So when you first have an aquarium and you haven't added any fish and you go to the store on day one, add all your stuff, add the fish, and the fish starts to poop and there's nothing in there for the ammonia to get converted, that's when we start running into issues because ammonia is highly toxic for fish. And you are gonna run into so many problems with fish deaths and it's gonna be a terrible first experience. So the first mistake that people make is not cycling their aquarium properly. What most people recommend and what we recommend in store most of the time is to use bottled bacteria, set up your aquarium, get it ready and come back the next weekend to buy your fish. But during that week, we recommend adding the beneficial bacteria which you can buy. Even better, if you've got a friend with a cycled aquarium, I would recommend pinching some of their filter media, some aged aquarium material to seed your tank. So that's probably the easiest way to do it. What I do for all my tanks in this room is all the tanks are cycled now, but if I have a brand new setup, I will take an existing filter, seed that aquarium and that way that's how we get our bacteria in there. And I always recommend starting small but just understanding this is gonna avoid a lot of mistakes. The common issue is just not understanding this. The important thing to remember with our first mistake is patience at the start, saves fish at the end. That's one of the most important things to remember. Alrighty, number two is a very common beginner issue and this is overfeeding. Overfeeding is quite a self-explanatory issue. It's one of the most common mistakes that people will make in their fish keeping journey. If you overfeed, what's gonna happen is the fish are gonna eat what they can. We normally recommend feeding fish as much as they can eat within about 30 seconds and anything less to just siphon it out because what's gonna happen is that fish food that sits on the bottom of your aquarium is instantly just gonna start rotting and it's gonna contribute to adding ammonia to your tank. If your tank is not balanced properly, this ammonia is gonna start to kill fish not to mention it's just rotting, decaying matter ruining your water quality and something that you need to understand very quickly on how to not overfeed. I feed bug buffet. This is a very dense food and a little goes a long way. I'll crush up a pellet here and there for some tanks that I don't wanna overfeed. If I see food in there a couple hours after feeding, I will siphon it out and something you can also do to help with overfeeding is to add a cleanup crew. So the easiest cleanup crew that I use in most of my tanks is mystery snails. What will happen is if I overfeed, mystery snails will go down the bottom and clean up all that excess food and save me the ammonia spike because they'll eat it, decompose it even further into their own waste and then that waste can then be converted in your normal ecosystem nitrate cycles. Just as a general rule of thumb, whatever you can see the fish eat within about 30 seconds is appropriate. I prefer lots of little feedings than one mega feeding during the day. So if you can just feed little bite-sized pieces of food throughout the day and just keep that digestive system ticking, that's better but to be honest, most people are overfeeding their fish anyways. Feeding a fish once in the morning, once at night is normally plenty, especially if you're not trying to breed them or anything like that. Number three is a very common mistake and one that I made about three months ago, which was, and I haven't really stopped thinking about it since I made this mistake and this mistake is not dechlorinating your water. I've made this mistake so many times. Unfortunately, most of our municipal water supplies are contaminated with chloramines and chlorine and fluoride and all these terrible chemicals that they use to preserve the water so that by the time it comes from the water treatment facility to your taps, it is safe. Unfortunately, this water is not safe for the aquariums and I even go to the extent of using a filter on my home water supply for my drinking water just because I think this stuff's probably terrible for your inside gut biome but I have made the mistake so many times where I'll do a water change, I'll fill the tank back up with town water and forget to add Prime or Fritz to the water and I come back an hour later, maybe I was in a rush and all of the fish are dead. I did this with my prized possession Zebra Pleco babies. I had 20 in the tank and I turned, I did a water change, didn't add the chemical, came back and they were all gone. So very common mistake. I think it's very important that you listen to me on this one and if you're doing a water change, just make damn sure that you add it. You can never overdose these chemicals or at least it's very hard to and it's such a mistake. It's probably the worst one. It is just the worst feeling when you're trying to do a good thing for your fish tank, you're trying to do a water change, you're trying to clean it up, you're trying to take care of your babies and you come back and they're all dead. It is the worst, most gut-wrenching feeling knowing that you killed them from your own mistake. I still haven't forgotten about that day. Very traumatic and very upsetting. So yeah, definitely want to avoid as much as you can just always make sure that you're adding dechlorinator and you can always add more than you think you need to just to be safe. It doesn't hurt. Number four is a common issue and this is not cleaning your filter media correctly. Like I mentioned earlier on, keeping an aquarium is all about understanding the process and the vital role of beneficial bacteria in the tank. A lot of your beneficial bacteria are stored in your filter. So when people go to clean their aquariums and they go and they clean their filter because it's been nasty, it's been months since you've cleaned it and it's full of dirt and stuff, they'll take their filter media, especially their biological filtration media like ceramic rings or crushed coral, whatever, and they'll run it under the town water. Now the town water, firstly it'll kill our fish but it's definitely gonna kill our beneficial bacteria and they'll wash their filter media underneath the town water in their tap or their sink in their kitchen, put it back in the tank and they have just completely nuked their biggest supply of beneficial bacteria in their aquarium and they have completely disrupted the ecosystem in that tank. So unless you've got a really healthy substrate or tons and tons of plants and rocks in there that are covered in beneficial bacteria which will quickly seed that filter again, they are just gonna run into imbalance and start losing fish for no reason. What I recommend, if you've just got one aquarium or three or four aquariums and you're cleaning out a filter, use your old aged aquarium water to do this, please. Rinse it out in old aged aquarium water and you will never run into an issue. The goal when you're cleaning your filter is just to get that extra sediment that is collected and the decomposed matter that's in there out and you do not need to wash it under your sink. I will, on occasion, wash a lot of my filters in this fish room under the tap and this is because I have a very good understanding of what's going on in my tank just because I've kept fish for a long time and when I clean the filters, I know that there's enough beneficial bacteria still in the tank to seed that filter again. Do as I say, not as I do. Just make sure to wash your aquarium filter in your old aged aquarium water. It's very important. I think it's also worth mentioning here that having a dirty filter is actually a good sign. This is where your beneficial bacteria live. So having a pristine crystal clear filter is not what we want. We want that thing a tiny bit nasty, not over the top, but like a little bit dirty and that's how we know it's doing its job. Number five, super common issue, something that I am very pedantic about, especially with my fish room. This is not quarantining fish properly. Now, in store, we do our best to make sure that people receive the best possible quality fish here in the city and this is by quarantining our fish. So we have a main wall of aquariums in our store and before the fish can reach the main wall of aquariums, they go through our quarantine room. The fish come in from a wholesaler, they go straight into this room and they are monitored and fed and taken care of for at least seven days before they are ticked off and put into the shop tanks where we then sell them. We still run into disease in our shop tanks, it's just part of owning an aquarium store, but we do our best to make sure that all of our fish are quarantined, but you have to do this yourself if you are serious about fish keeping. You have to try and do your best to make sure that you're quarantining fish before they come into your aquarium. So if you're setting up a new aquarium, you don't really need to quarantine fish. If you've never had fish in that tank, buy the fish, get the best quality ones that you can and add them to your tank, absolutely fine. But if you're gonna add even more species to that tank about a month later or two months later, it is very important that you don't make the mistake of just adding those fish in because this is where we start to run into issues with random diseases popping up and one sick fish can definitely contaminate an entire tank. So what I do here in the room is I will set up dedicated quarantine tanks. So anything new that comes in either from the shop or if I go to a club meet or something like that and buy some new fish, they will go into their separate tank and I will just monitor them for at least a month just to make sure that they don't have any internal parasites, aren't showing any signs of weakness, something that's gonna be vicious or if they're gonna die from the disease that they die there and they don't spread it around my room. I have had terrible circumstances of where I have bought fish, introduced them in, just trusting that they were gonna be okay, didn't know that they held a disease and I have had like one single fish bring in a disease that's wiped out at least 10 tanks in my first original fish room. It was absolutely devastating. This might seem really overkill for a lot of beginners but what I recommend doing is if you are buying, say you've set up an aquarium and you're buying some new fish, just be aware of the risk that you can bring a new disease and if you want to make sure that your aquarium doesn't crash or that those fish are safe, there's heaps of simple options for you to set up to create a simple quarantine, whether that's using a tub with a sponge filter in it and just monitoring those fish for a week. It seems overkill but honestly, most experienced aquarium keepers do this. I'm not saying that you're gonna run into the issue every single time with adding new fish. I'm sure that nine times out of 10 things are gonna be okay but it's just that once where it just really sucks and you just wish that you did the precautionary measures to make sure it didn't happen. Number six, definitely guilty of this one. Not acclimating your fish properly. This especially applies to adding shrimp to your tank. It is very important that when you get new fish and you bring them home and you add them to your tank, that you do it as gradually as possible to not stress that fish out. The fish you're bringing home from the store has a completely different water chemistry to the water chemistry that you have in the tank that they're gonna live in and by taking those fish and just dropping them into your tank, you are exposing them to the risk of high stress. I have stressed out so many fish by being impatient and just instantly dumping them into the tank. What I do and what I recommend to everyone, if you are gonna do a proper acclimation, a lot of people talk about floating the bag in the top of the tank. This only really helps with getting the temperatures the same which is still better than nothing but I recommend doing a drip acclimation. I need to make a video on how to do a drip acclimation but I always recommend doing a drip acclimation. I recommend it to all of the fish that come into our store that are really sensitive and honestly, just as a general premise, I do it at home as much as possible as well especially with stuff that I'm scared of losing. Yeah, not acclimating a fish properly, super easy way, dumb way to lose a fish. Just be patient, give them time, let them settle into their new tank and don't stress them out more than they already have been. Number seven, pretty common issue, something that I don't really run into but this is just mixing incompatible species. So this normally happens with people who are negligent, who haven't really kept dish a long time, see something pretty in the store and just add it to their tank and it causes havoc. What comes with keeping an aquarium is as much responsibility as any other pets and it is definitely important to do your research before adding any species to your tank. So for instance, adding a betta to a tank with lots of shrimp in there, people do this all the time. Bettas can be notorious for eating shrimp populations down. They can be kept successfully with adult shrimp but they'll eat all the babies and juveniles and completely kill off the breeding cycle. Little things like this. What I recommend to fix this is there is hundreds of videos on YouTube, there's plenty on my channel of compatible fish to add to your aquarium, et cetera, et cetera. Nowadays, we have the beauty of AI and honestly, ChatGPT is a great way to figure out whether you can add certain species to your tank. ChatGPT has the access of filtering through all of Google's fish information and actually gives pretty good advice. I even use ChatGPT nowadays for advice in my fish room. Ask ChatGPT, can I add this fish to my tank? It's gonna give you really good advice and prevent you from making this mistake. All right, number eight. I got off the hook with this the other day but this is very, very important and this is not having a backup power supply. Whether that's a USB chargeable air pump or a battery air pump or a generator. I need to invest in a generator. Unfortunately, I am completely broke at the moment and cannot afford to spend $1,500 on a generator yet. Yes, I know I have very expensive fish in here. I mean to get a generator but we lost power from a storm a little over a week ago and the power was out for eight hours in here. I do have an old generator but unfortunately it didn't fire up. It's not a very good one and yeah, it was actually very scary. So we will be investing in a generator soon but having some sort of backup option if the power goes out so that you don't lose your tank, it's gonna happen. You are gonna lose power at some point and it's important that you have a backup generator. So we sell all sorts of battery backup air pumps in store. If you've got an aquarium, just buy one with a couple of outlets and just have it ready there in case you do have a power outage. Most power outages don't last for multiple days at a time. So number nine. Now I don't really run into this mistake anymore because I have automated water changes. So it's very easy for me to change water in my fish room. It's basically just a flick of the switch and I can just do water changes in here. No buckets, no hoses, very easy and hard to avoid. But when I was first in the hobby, it was really easy to skip doing water changes. It was just one of those things that, you know, you'd have to be motivated to do. It was a bit of a pain in the bum, getting the buckets out, getting the hoses out and it was annoying. And I remember you'd get busy, life would get in the way and you'd go one month without water changes, you'd push it to two months, the tank starts to evaporate a little bit. You might top it up a little bit, but not doing water changes is something that can definitely bite you in the bum because one day, if you just avoid it for long enough, it's gonna cause a problem. Every tank needs its water changed at some point and yeah, avoiding water changes is a huge mistake. You come back one day, the tank's fallen out of balance, the nitrates have just gone through the roof and you have completely poisoned your tank. It has happened to me. But yeah, like I said, I have automated this fishroom as much as possible so I don't really run into this issue. But yeah, I used to do that at the start. And number 10, my final mistake that people make and myself to this day is impatience. Impatience is pretty much at the core of all of the mistakes that people make in the hobby, whether that's dumping in fish too quick, not cycling your tank quick enough. This hobby is all about patience. If you wonder why people have 30, 40 tanks at a time, it's because we are impatient and we like to see things going on all the time. Fish tanks are full of beautiful moments, but they aren't always highlights. It takes a tank sometimes months before it looks the way you want it to and it takes fish sometimes years to reach the size where they can breed. Everything in this hobby requires patience and I think that it's a lesson that a lot of new beginners need to learn. Plants take time to grow, fish tank time to grow, tanks take time to cycle. The more patient and measured you can be as an aquarist, the better success you're gonna have. So yeah, those were the mistakes that I run into. Let me know down below what mistakes you've made, if I missed any. Thank you for watching the video, guys. I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you in the next video.