[Moglow79]

I’ve recently inherited the coolest little betta who goes by the name bartholomew Bart for short and unfortunately his previous owners didn’t take great care of him. I haven’t owned a fish and was told he just needed to be fed and to add water. Needless to say his 1 gallon unfiltered unheated bowl is disgusting. I looked at my buddy and said I’m buying you a new home. I started researching last night for hours and picked it up today. I bought test strips which show the water is a bad as I thought. At this point I have no idea what to do at this point and I’m afraid of hurting him. Can someone please help Bart and give us some answers? His new tank is 3.5 gallons I bought way to many things for my guy but for the last 2 weeks he’s made my morning every day. I have all his stuff in the kitchen waiting for instructions. Thank you 😊

 

[RussellTheShihTzu]

Welcome to the Forum! And thank you for taking Bart.

Believe it or not, you need to leave Bart in his bowl. Do at least five 20% water changes over the course of several hours. This will slowly adjust him to clean water instead of shocking him. Once you've done the requisite changes you can move him to the 3.5.

Then you need to cycle the tank. A tutorial is linked.

CYCLING: the two-sentence tutorial

Change half the water when either ammonia or nitrite approach 0.50ppm (alternately, 25% at 0.25ppm), or weekly, whichever comes first. Add Seachem Prime at 2-drops per gallon of tank size every day until cycled. That’s all you have to do. You can stop reading now. But there’s a lot of...

www.bettafish.com

If you keep him warm, his water clean and feed nutritious food he will do well for you.