There are some things that you need for a fish tank, except for the food and water changing stuff, and of course the fish tank itself.
It’s this stuff you want in your cabinet if something goes wrong but you don’t necessarily need them every week or even for years. It consists of medicine, staring bacteria, water conditioner, and activated carbon. All these links are to Amazon.
Conditioner
A water conditioner is not necessary but I would highly recommend you to have one while changing the water and starting up a new fish tank. The benefits of a water conditioner are that it will make the water clear, remove heavy metals from the water, remove chlorine from the tap water and helping the fish healing any ulcers. It also helps the fish to be healthy by preventing harming bacteria.
I use the conditioner from Easy-Life. I really like it and it makes the water crystal clear. However, it’s not available anymore but you can get Tetra AquaSafe Plus on Amazon instead which is also a very good product.
Starting bacteria
Staring bacteria is active bacteria cultures helping out to add the good bacteria culture to your fish tank. You put it in your filter where most of the bacteria are living. Since you add good bacteria it will compete with the bad bacteria making your fish healthy.
You use it to help start a new fish tank or to boost your already running fish tank. It’s not necessary but is very good if you have a nitrate spike or any other condition that is harmful to your fish tank. A good, healthy bacteria culture is the base of a healthy fish tank.
I put it in once a month helping my fish tank out. At the beginning of a fish tank, I have put it in every time and there have been no problems at all. I would imagine it has helped quite a lot but it’s hard to know.
I use Easy-Life starting bacteria and is liking it a lot. As it is with their conditioner it’s not available. You can get Tetra SafeStart instead on Amazon for a good deal which is a similar product.
Medication
Your fish could get sick, just like any other animal. When they get ill you need to give them medicine. Medicine is something important to have in your cabinet for those situations.
When choosing medicine it’s important to choose medicine covering the different kinds of diseases your fish may get, at least the most common ones. The safest bet is to use a medicine covering a lot of diseases at once since it could be hard for a beginner to determine the kind of disease your fish might have.
A “focused” treatment that treats a specific disease is always better but a good all-purpose medication is the API General Cure which you can buy on Amazon.
I use the eSHa EXIT and eSHa 2000 as a combination system. These two medications cover a lot of different diseases together. The downside is that it’s quite hard to find them outside of Europe.
Activated carbon is used to remove medication and other pollutants from the water. It’s necessary to have if treating your fish with medicine or your fish tank is unhealthy.
Hopefully, you don’t need to use activated carbon since a healthy fish tank could go without the carbon.
I use the activated carbon from Sera and it’s doing its work. Since I don’t use it that often I cannot compare with other brands. You can buy Sera Super Carbon from Amazon.
