From Tennessee
Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2012 5:50 pm
Hello, everyone. I have been reading everything on here over past month or so as I fell in love with zebras about as soon as I got into the hobby a couple years ago, but recently had a friend of mine who owns the local fish store offer me a great deal on as many zebras as I wanted. So I have been looking at what i need to do to get my tank setup for them and already have a bunch of questions. Most of them probably don't have a single right answer from what i have read so far, but just kind of nervous and want to get it right as this will be a big investment for me and by far my single largest adventure into the hobby.
My current setup that I will be using for the zebras is a 55 gallon tank with about 4" bed of Eco-Complete Planted Aquarium Substrate. It running 2 220w heaters, though planning on replacing one of them with a 300w or even 400w heater (any suggestions of if one would be better than the other would be great) to handle the higher temperatures I need for the zebras as I know I need to get the tank to about 83 degrees F over the 76-78 degrees that been running most my tanks at. For filtration I'm just running a standard Aquatech 60 gallon hang on back filter, which I have read some places is plenty but other places have suggest some really expensive high end filtration systems, so not sure if I need to upgrade this or not. I was also planning on getting just a regular power head at about 650 gallon per hour in order to add some flow to the aquarium, but then I read where that people have created setups to create more of a one directional flow to better simulate a river which is zebras natural habitat so I was wondering if anyone had any experience could tell me how important that is to create or what is best way to create the flow in the tank.
My current setup that I will be using for the zebras is a 55 gallon tank with about 4" bed of Eco-Complete Planted Aquarium Substrate. It running 2 220w heaters, though planning on replacing one of them with a 300w or even 400w heater (any suggestions of if one would be better than the other would be great) to handle the higher temperatures I need for the zebras as I know I need to get the tank to about 83 degrees F over the 76-78 degrees that been running most my tanks at. For filtration I'm just running a standard Aquatech 60 gallon hang on back filter, which I have read some places is plenty but other places have suggest some really expensive high end filtration systems, so not sure if I need to upgrade this or not. I was also planning on getting just a regular power head at about 650 gallon per hour in order to add some flow to the aquarium, but then I read where that people have created setups to create more of a one directional flow to better simulate a river which is zebras natural habitat so I was wondering if anyone had any experience could tell me how important that is to create or what is best way to create the flow in the tank.