Aquiring the Set-Up

I recently bought an 11 gallon, (was told it was 20gallons) a filter, and gravel from a lady on craigslist.com. It also came with some fake plants and a sunken ship ornament. I didn't really know what I was getting into; I just knew I wanted to start a freshwater tank. After a surprisingly nice talk with a lady from Petsmart, I decided to make my tank a tropical tank as oppose to a room temperature tank and that I wanted to have live plants growing in it. After doing some intensive research online, I decided I wanted a new filter and new gravel for the plants.

The tank came with some Aquatec power filter that is only really found in kit set ups. It did an ok job with the mechical filtering but I was worried about the biological filter quality (good bacteria). I decided to with the Marineland Penguin 100B. It has a unique bio-wheel that builds up good ammonia digesting bacteria. It seems to work great but does produce slightly more noise but it is tolerable. So far it had only been running about 2 days so I can't give much feed back other than that.

The gravel I chose was Caribsea Eco-Complete made for live plants. I saw some reviews that high reccommended it. After I dumped it into the tank, the water was very murky and took about 12 hours to settle. When it finally did settle, a white film developed on the top layer of gravel wand wasn't asthetically pleasing. There was also some white rocks that ruin the monochromatic look of the gravel. It was also easily resuspended in the water causing murkiness. I did some research and found that this is a common problem with the product among others. I emailed the Caribsea tech support and they said that this is how the product is currently turning out. He suggested siphoning off the layer and burying the white rocks or picking them out. I didn't have a siphon so instead I mixed up the white dust in the water and did a few water changes. This reduced the amount of white dust and hopefully over time it will go away overtime. If you want live plant substrate I would suggest an alternative as this product is currently not at the quality it should be.