Today I constructed my quarantine tank to be used with my new fish purchases later in the year! I roughly followed the guide at
this site. For fishless cycling help I refered to
this guide. Special thanks to both of those sites for the help.
This is basically what I started with. Most of it was tank equipment which was laying around in my room or the garage. I have one old tank (I believe to be 2-3 gallons. It's small, but will be big enough to quarantining a couple fish at a time), one old filtration system which still works, a couple old filters, a couple air pumps and a couple of air stones (I probably won't use the pumps or air stones).
A day in advance, I put one of my old filters into my 10 gallon's filtration system. Hopefully I will some bacteria on it to help jumpstart the colony.
Here's how it looks fully constructed. Notice that I cut out some black garbage bag plastic and put it underneath to protect the shelf from water.
After filling with water, I used an eyedropper to put 5 drops of NH3 (Ammonium Hydroxide) into my tank. I plugged in my filter system (without filter in it) and let it run for a minute to mix up the water, then took a test sample and tested the water.
It looks to be at about 2ppm. So, I added 3 more drops and tested again and it was close enough to the 3ppm I was aiming for. So, everyday I will add 8 drops of NH3 for my bacterial colonies until I get my fish.
TO BE CONTINUED...