Steps For Cleaning your Aquarium
Keeping your aquarium clean is an important step in the maintenance of your fish tank and will keep it looking great as well as a healthy environment for your fish. But cleaning the tank may seem like a daunting task and many people put it off until it is too late and the water quality is so toxic that their fish are dying and you can barely see into the fish tank. Ideally, your aquarium should be cleaned about once a month. Here are some steps you can take to get yourself into a routine - once you have done this a few times and you have a down to a science you’ll breeze right through it!First off, you've got to unplug everything - the filter, the lights, the heater. You won’t need any special soaps and detergents, In fact you should not use them as this won’t be good for the fish and you won’t have to remove the fish from the aquarium as this in’t good for them either.
Now there are two methods of thought as to which job should be done first - the scraping or the vacuuming. Personally I do the vacuuming first as this is how the water gets siphoned out of the tank and it is much easier to scrape when the tank water is lower and the water is not sloshing over the sides. However, some experts maintain that scraping the algae into lower levels of water will make the concentration of algae per water higher and may stress out the fish more. You can make your own decision as to which one to do first.
The Vacuuming
To vacuum your tank, you’re going to use a gizmo called a Python which is really just a big tube attached to a rubber hose that drains into either your sink or a bucket. Once you get the suction going, it will act like a vacuum and you can literally use the Python to vacuum up all the debris that is resting on the bottom. I like to push the tube into the gravel little bit so tiny pieces of decaying food and fish waste that is settled down in side the gravel can get vacuumed up to. Don’t get too carried away though, because you want to be sure that you only siphon out about 20% of the water - anymore and this could be harmful to your fish.
The Scraping
When scraping your aquarium, you’ll want to get all the built up algae off the sides of the tank, the decorations in the tank and other things like the heater, filter tubes and whatever else algae has accumulated on. To do this you use a special sponge with a handle that you can find in any fish supply store. If you have an acrylic tank, be sure to buy one now can be used on acrylic as these sponges are abrasive and some may scratch the acrylic.
Once you’ve vacuum and scraped, now you can put more water in the tank. Be sure to use dechlorinated water and add a water conditioner per the directions on the bottle. Fill the tank up to the top then start up your filter and heater. You might want to wait a little while for things to settle down but you should use your aquarium test kit to test the levels of ammonia nitrite and nitrate to be sure everything is in court order in the aquarium. If you have a salt water tanks, you’ll also want to test the salinity.
See, now wasn’t that easy?
You can actually make the job even easier by being sure not to over feed your fish and by making sure you don’t cram too many fish into the tank. Also, try adding a Chinese algae eater to the aquarium you won’t believe how these little guys can help keep algae down!