Fishy experts - help me upgrade my fish tank please !!

[LeafTurner]

Hello,

Well - the two canary goldfish have made it to 10 months - which is a bit of a miracle made possible by lots of good advice on here !! (Thank you !!) - so I have ordered them a new bigger tank !

They are currently in a starter tank - 14 L - and it is all cycled and full of lush new plants that they are nibbling madly ! So the new BiOrb will be here in a few days - and I need talking through what I do ?

Shall I cycle it empty ? Or can I transfer something from the small tank and plonk them in straight away ?

And - BiOrb owners - tell me how you find them ? Is it true you only have to clean them every 6 weeks ?

Thank you so much !!!

bump

Not sure about the transfer thing as we have never done it. But we do have a BiOrb and yes it does go 4-6 weeks between water/filter changes with no real problems. We had a bit of a problem with algae on the sides and bought two fish to eat it (don't ask me what they are called - I can't remember) - anyway, they are now the biggest fish in the tank but we have no algae

I think snails are meant to eat algae too !

snails are probably a better option if it is a cold water tank. However, as with all fish be careful where you get snails from - my last (a long time ago) goldfish were wiped out by nasty disease brought in by a snail which was meant to be cleaning the tank

Aren't there any BiOrb fans in today ?

Don't have a Biorb or goldfish, (all tropicals) but the principle is the same for the water.
You can very easily 'seed' the new tank with water/filter sponges etc from the old tank and speed up if not eliminate the cycling needed for the new one.
How much does a Biorb hold? If the water in your old tank will be about 50% of the new tank then I reckon you could just top it up with new treated water and put the fish straight in. If you can use some of the filter sponges too then you could get away with less of the old water.
Basically as long as you can transfer a significant portion of the good bacteria from the old tank then you can add fish straight away.
Has worked for us several times, but if you want to be 100%, sure, leave it to cycle for a while and test before adding the fish.