Tetra SafeStart: 3.38 oz. for New Fish Aquariums

Trina Gallardo: Works great for fresh set up of your tank

United States on Jul 04, 2023

Robin Williams: I never set up a tank and add fish. After tank has been run with plants for good while (month or more) I add this when adding fish. Highly recommend!

United States on Jul 01, 2023

S Wong: Sprung for aquarium for the kiddos (as no HECK in the world will I get a doggies). As I learned, a new aquarium needs to be running blah-blah-blah for the water ecosystem to develop bacteria and support life . Well, no way in HECK will elementary kids wait that long (about 2 to 3 weeks of just sitting there)...I don't think normal persons are that patient either...

Enter this solution. Gives an intense injection of bacterial items (kinda like a probiotic pill) to the aquarium. Not sure how they deal with shelf life (or extremes in temperature) but I didn't think about it until now. In any case, I treated my city tap water with anti-chlorine solution, sat one day, added this item, sat one day, and THEN got my 5 guppies and 5 Neon tetras for the 10-gallon tank. Well, to be honest I had some deaths (male guppies are weak..maybe overeating) but all the other fish did well. So, highly recommend to improve the survival rate of your new fish in a new tank.

United States on Apr 23, 2021

Ryan P. Walsh: I am typically not a fan of Tetra products as I've always looked at them as the Walmart of aquarium products. They're cheap in price but that is reflected in the quality of their products. This bacterial starter however is a whole different story.

I was setting up a new 10 gallon breeding rack and decided to test some of the major starter cultures against each other and of course a control with no bacteria added. I tested Dr. Tim's one and only, Seachem, this product, and Nite-Out in addition to a control no bacteria in two tanks each.

These were all fishless cycled using 2ppm ammonium chloride using a standard fishless cycle methodology (see Dr. Tim's website).

The control tank took 6 weeks to fully cycle at 2ppm N. A tank was considered fully cycled when it could cycle 2ppm of ammonium chloride to Nitrates with 0 ppm ammonia or nitrite in 12 hours. The following are the results in days for time to cycle:

TSS (this product) - 14 days
Ecological Labs Nite-out - 16 days
Seachem Stability- 30 days
Dr. Tim's One and Only - 42 days

A few notable things about TSS (Tetra safe start): It begins processing ammonia on a scale readable by a...

United States on Aug 19, 2018

NTH: One of the best I have used and the cycle's an aquarium the fastest. Highly recommended.

India on Sep 11, 2017

Amazon CustomerAmazon Customer: To explain briefly, this product adds nitrates to your tank. You need nitrates to eat ammonia and nitrite in the nitrogen cycle, so that your tank can self sustain when your fish create waste. It's sharing its environment with waste, but with good filtration and establishment of the nitrogen cycle, your fish won't die or suffer ill effects. Before you use or buy this product, please go read the youtube reviews and tutorials. Ez's Aquarium on youtube has a great video called "how to cycle your tank with tetra safe start plus".

Naturally, it would take 4-8 weeks to cycle a tank depending on what method you use to start producing ammonia, to form nitrite, to form nitrate in the end. With this product, no more than 2 weeks. I cycled a 5g nano tank with some plants covering almost half the tank, along with decaying food waste. I added this product a week into the cycle or on day 5 to a tank that had about 1ppm ammonia and some nitrite. A few hours later, I added my betta fish. Within 48 hrs the ammonia and nitrite levels dropped significantly. My nitrate levels were around 20-30ppm, so I did some water changes. On day 13 the tank was completely cycled with 0 for ammonia and...

United States on Jul 20, 2017