It's mainly due to wanting a planted tank with shrimp and fish. But don't want to spend a lot of money just to have them go belly up because my tank conditions aren't favourable.
Hiya, if you want to go about a bit of testing I would suggest just getting a TDS meter and possibly a PH pen both very cheap on ebay and reliable enough for what we are doing. i have to assume based on your name that you're in Scotland although you may not live there, that being the case your water is highly likely to be good for most species of fish as in very soft in minerals. Apologies if I'm teaching you too suck eggs because I'm not sure if you've kept fish before but the only real issue affecting adding fish to your tank is going to be Ammonia, Ammonia is very toxic to fish but in an established tank there usually isn't a lot of it about, you only usually get high levels when first setting up the tank until the filter matures so you could buy a product like
<Ammonia Alert> to start off with to check if levels are safe to add some fish gradually. We get round this by doing lots of frequent water changes initially for roughly 4 to 6 weeks until the filter and plants are consuming ammonia faster than its getting produced.
Check out the
<Substrate> section of the forum, some of the substrates in there deliberately add some ammonia when its new in the tank to kick start the process of the filter without having to do it with fish in the tank and risking their health. If some plants, fish and shrimp are your goal also take a look at
<Low tech> section of the forum. The secret is if you don't want to complicate things too much don't use very high lighting over the plants and pick plants that do well under low lighting. Something that's also worth a read would be Duck weed index if you search for that. Basically you add some plants that float and they will give you an idea if you have enough fertiliser in the tank because if they are doing well so should the other plants. They're also excellent at sucking waste products like ammonia out of the water, provide a safe haven for fish to hide and shade a bit of light.
Coming back to fertiliser, if you keep lights low enough you should be fine using an all-in-one fertiliser bought from one of our sponsors in powder form which works out considerably cheaper than buying it premixed from shops, all you're paying for in the shop is 99.9% water and the bottle so if you're a true Scot that will work for you
You may also need a bit of magnesium which you can buy again from the sponsors or plain old epsom salts available off the high streets.
The TDS meter will come in handy for certain species of shrimp. Ones like Red Cherry Shrimp are pretty hardy and will tolerate most conditions but some of the more fancy varieties like a low TDS. Luckily for you your water will be fine for them but over time your TDS may rise, solution is just change more water.
Above all don't get tempted by the lights they're not that important in a planted community tank. they're a bit like Gremilins that way
Other than that water testing is a bit hit or miss because hobby grade tests we buy in the pet shop aren't that accurate and the results don't mean much to fish health anyway. Even the scientists who reside here can't get accurate results with thousands of pounds worth of equipment and a PHD so spend your money on fish and plants, far more enjoyable.
Just to add, when you're good to go get some pictures in the Journal section, it's far easier to help with problems if we can see what you have done from the start and we all like following each others tanks and looking at pictures.
