A clean aquarium is essential for keeping your fish happy and keeping their environment healthy. Basic maintenance conducted regularly means that it should look great all the time. If you can, try to create a monthly tank cleaning routine that becomes a habit so you can your aquarium maintenance done quickly and easily.

Before starting on your cleaning, always unplug any electrical attachments or accessories on your tank, such as the filter, lights, or heaters you may have. Dont use any soap or detergent to clean your tank. These chemicals are harmful to fish and could easily make them very ill or even result in death. If those chemicals can make tank fish ill, then think about what flushing them down your sink each day does to the natural environment of fish in the wild.

The next two cleaning steps both need to be done, but the order in which you do them is up to you. Aquarium stores may advise that you vacuum first, but this reduces the water levels, so this means the scraping chore can potentially increase the algae concentration in the smaller amount of water remaining and can harm your fish.

Vacuuming Your Tank ” Aquariums call tank vacuums Pythons and theyre nothing more than a rubber hose with a tube attached at the end. The idea is to drain a little water from your tank at the same time as sucking up any dirt, debris, food waste or other bits that can pollute your aquarium. As you vacuum, run the tube around decorations and filters and down into the gravel or stones to get the bits that hide there.

Dont vacuum for too long as you risk reducing the water levels too far. You shouldnt remove any more than about one-fifth of the total water volume, so this means vacuum quickly.

Scraping Your Tank ” Scraping the sides of your aquarium to remove algae or debris is an easy job and should be done using a sponge attached to a handle. These can be bought from the aquarium store and are designed especially for this purpose. The sponge is designed to easily remove any algae from decorations or glass or your filter. Always check that the type of sponge you use wont be too abrasive or it can scratch or eve damage acrylic surfaces.

Once youve finished your vacuuming and scraping, begin filling the tank back to normal water levels. Remember not to use tap water in your aquarium. You should use always de-chlorinated water in your tank. When the water is back at a proper level, test the water for ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels with your aquarium test kit. If you have a salt-water aquarium, then always check the salinity levels to avoid your fish becoming stressed and sick.

Tags: Aquariums

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 9:03 am and is filed under Aquariums. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.