New Frugal Fishtank

I have started to reconnect with hobbies I used to have in the past, and one of these hobbies is maintaining a fishtank.

Setting up a new tank can be expensive, luckily I still had some gear from the last time I tried this years ago. I still had an air pump, sponge filter, heater, light bar, gh/kh minerals, tds reader, thermometer, small net, and some wood / pinecones.

To start a new one, I mainly needed gravel, glass tank, and something to place the tank on. There was no way I was going to buy these things at full price, so I waited around for a while.

At my apartment complex, people tend to leave out furniture by the dumpsters, and one day I was able snag a small standing shelf.

This shelf was slightly dirty and was covered in snow, but after cleaning it off and drying it out it was the perfect size for where we wanted the fish tank to go.

I was going to look around on craigslist for 2nd hand fish tanks, but decided to check if petco had a sale on their glass tanks. Turns out they did, and I was able to walk away with a 20 gal long tank for $25 which is around what the second hand tanks in the area were going for. This deal isn't as good as the deals they ran years ago, $1 per gallon, but it was decent enough for me to justify buying new instead of looking for second hand. I also got two large packs of gravel which came out to more than I wanted to spend on just rocks - $40, but they ended up looking nice. That night I got water in the fishtank.

A few days later I got plants and a couple of snails to start the cycle process. The snails really liked boiled cucumber.

The snails seemed to not be doing the best, and we ended up losing one, but the other is going strong. After a month we bought a water testing kit for $30 to see what the water parameters were at. The parameters were good, though the gh and kh could be higher so I added some mineral powder. A few days after that we went to the local pet store to get some red cherry shrimp and java moss, this trip also came out to about $30. I poked a few holes in the bag instead of using the drip method to acclimate the shrimp to the water temp and parameters. The java moss was added directly to the tank, and turns out some small snails were riding along with the moss. There were only three of them at the time of adding everything to the tank. I also ended up getting a top for the tank to cut down on evaporation, this came out to about $20.

After letting the shrimp sit in the bag for a few hours they were released into the tank, and this is what it looks like today. It is about a month later and all the plants are growing in nicely, and the shrimps are doing good. There are many baby snails, and looks like they will soon take over the tank when they start growing up, but so far they don't seem to be causing much of a problem. I have added some egg shells to try and add some calcium for the snails. I have been told that egg shells can smell up the tank, but I just peeled off the inside membrane of the egg from the shell and boiled it before adding it to the tank and I haven't noticed any smell at all.

All and all this setup cost about $145, which I thought was pretty expensive. The women checking me out at the local fish store said she spent $500 to setup her first 10gal fish tank. Even if I had to buy all my previous equipment new again I wouldn't have cracked that, so I don't know what she was doing. If I wanted to wait around for something to come up on craigslist, I would have likely been able to reduce my cost a bit, and if I needed to get all my equipment again, there were people in the area giving old equipment away as they fell out of the hobby. Though I am not upset with how much this setup cost. Over time as the cherry shrimp breed, I am hoping to sell some of them off, and if I can eventually break even then I would be very satisfied with setting up this fish tank.