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There are lots of fish that will thrive in your basement with very little heat added. Some that come to mind are white clouds and goldfish along with the entire spectrum of goodeids.

You are not cycling your tank, it is sitting there wasting your time. If you had dechlorinated the water, the small amount of ammonia in the tank might be having some minimal effect to begin a cycle. For stocking levels, once you get the tank cycled, you are looking at 3 or 4 fish total in that...

A nice piece of half inch ply should do the trick of distributing the pressure over the entire area.

It looks like my 40 long made by ODell from the mid 1970s and a top for it will be easy to make. You can buy the plastic hinge material from places like Foster&Smith and can also buy the back plastic strips there. All you need to do after that is get some decent measurements and have a local...

The RO will never flow when the tank is empty. It produces pure water a drop at a time. That is why there is a storage tank in the system. The tank stores the water for you to use it conveniently.

I find that my own tank at 3 gallons capacity is a handy size. It can fit on one of the shelves under my kitchen counter so I placed it in that corner where you can never get at things anyway. It will freely discharge into a container for about 2 1/2 gallons after it is completely filled, the...

As BigFoot said, use a slit in the end of a filter sponge. It looks like this on my desktop. And it looks like this in place on the filter inlet tube after about a month.

You can also order PC bulbs from AHSupply. I think my last bulb was beteen $15 and $20. They carry lots of different light spectra in the 4 pin in a row configuration because that fits their kits.

The inch per gallon is intended to keep newbies from doing stupid overstocking. If it is ignored, the end result is often an overstocked tank. Making excuses to ignore part of the bioload is another way for a newbie to get in trouble but it is not too unusual to see it done. The cories will add...

I have kept mollies in salted tanks in the past and am keeping them now without salt. I can't see any difference in the mollies at all. The platies and plants, on the other hand, do not fare as well with salt in the water. What both platies and mollies do need is water with a somewhat high...

The tiger barbs and the gold barbs are not peaceful community fish, they are very nippy. I have kept both at different times and have some gold barbs right now. Other than them, the tank would be a fine grouping. The tank will not be overstocked but inappropriately stocked.

It sounds like you have it figured out Biogeek. I was going to suggest goodeids until I read that last post. There are many to choose from and almost all do well in hard water. My own tap water is from 250 ppm to 325 ppm of TDS depending on the time of year. My KH runs about 12 german degrees...

ShadyLady, you said you were having trouble getting the nitrates down but that shouldn't be hard. If your chemistry is out of whack, do a 50% water change and the water will much better resemble tap water than before the change. If you have high nitrates in the tap water, don't even try to get...

My experience with plecs is that I don't trust them. The only thing I feel safe with when it comes to algae is otocinclus. For algae without attacking fry they would be a better choice. The down side is that the kribs will attack any bottom dweller when they have staked out a breeding territory...

Biospira has a better reputation than most of the instant cycle products. It seems to work well enough if it has been properly cared for and kept refrigerated between manufacture and your use and if it is fairly freshly made.

Actually BS, the mineral content of the water affects the fish's ability to rid itself of wastes and to control its own tendency to absorb water from its environment. Although most fish are adaptable to some degree, the extreme of zero minerals in the water will either kill them quickly or not...

Another point to consider is the test method you are using. Most people will either tell you the paper strips are useless or the more diplomatic ones will say inaccurate. You want to get a liquid type test kit for at least ammonia and nitrites as soon as you can. Depending on what forum you are...

Welcome to the site MossMouse. It sounds like you are where I was a couple of years ago. I knew a lot about fish in general but nothing about plants and no detailed information about any particular fish. I have found that by setting up single species tanks and actually studying the fish before...

Welcome JimV. Living in Indiana, you must attend the ALA convention in Indy next spring. You just live too close to miss it.

My own approach works OK too. I cut a hole into the end of a filter sponge and slip it over the end of my filter inlet tube. Similar in concept and it lasts a long time with minimal care.

You can easily offset the filter toward one end or the other of the stand and not worry about keeping the hoses the same length. Given the choice I would make the inlet shorter than the return hose. the inlet relies completely on gravity while the return has the impeller to push the flow through...

It would probably be between low and medium as far as the plants you could have. Some people would call it medium or higher, but geometry is not your friend on a small tank and it takes more watts per gallon to satisfy a particular plant in that arrangement.

Good plants for low light are anubias, cryptocoryne, java fern and java moss. You might possibly get enough light for valisneria too.

You stated that you have been changing the filter every 2 weeks so your tank is not cycled. What that means is the bacteria that GZeiger was talking about are not established in your tank. You need to obtain a test kit that will at least allow you to test for ammonia and nitrites using a liquid...

If you use a HOB filter, you will need to run both the HOB and your sponge filter together long enough to establish the HOB as a biofilter. Usually 3 or 4 weeks of both running together would be long enough.