Puzzled !!

[vijayw]

Keeping fish since December only.

Off the shelf tank with all the fittings.
Stocked lots of fish within few days of setup.
After my first fish died, only then I started reading about fish and all related stuff.

Cycle the tank.
Lot said about cycling, ammonia, nitrate etc, I am wondering what after say ideal cycle? How long the tank can go without any water change or any specific maintenance?

What if I instead regularly do a partial (20% or 50%) water change every two weeks? With syphoning the gravel for fish waste? Wont it be sufficient enough?

Quite possible I am.missing some basics.
But everywhere I found individual best practices in silo (say how to cycle, how to setup, how to cure xyz disease etc), not a complete guideline, or step by step procedure.

Am sure the basics will remain same for every new tank setup and maintaining it.

Can someone pls help me understand this stuff?

 

[vijayw]

It's a 30 gn tank.

Except for one real bad day, I lost my 4 mollies one after other,

I mostly find a dead fish in the morning every one or two weeks.

I don't have any secondary tank, just a small fish bowl, that I use to separate a fish if I see it's not behaving normally.

 

[rlederer]

There are lots of sites on aquarium cycling, like this one: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/fish-tank-cycling.

It'll typically take 6 weeks for the aquarium to cycle. Then you have to keep up the maintenance, mainly replacing about 25% of the water each week, but that depends on how many fish you have. Siphoning the gravel is a good idea as well. Skipping maintenance is not a good idea as ammonia just builds up in the tank.

Read a few sites on cycling, you'll figure it out.

 

[charliebankston]

Ideally you want to keep your nitrates under 40ppm. After it's cycled. That will determine how often and how much water to change. I have some heavily stocked tanks i change 25% weekly. Lightly stocked i do about 33% monthly. It just depends on your water parameters. Rled is right, skipping maintenance is bad. Vacuum gravel is good. Water changes are good. The cleaner the tank from bad water, the less likely for your fish to get diseases. Don't clean out the brown gunk slime from your filter either, that's your beneficial bacteria. If it has a disposable filter cartridge, only change that out as needed, no quicker than every 4 weeks tho