You should clean your fish aquarium using a gravel, vacuum or water changer. You can start by cleaning the algae off the walls of the glass, followed by the decorations. You can then start the siphon using the gravel vacuum and start to clean the substrate in the aquarium. The gravel vacuum is used to siphon water through it as it picks up debris on the bottom of your sand or gravel.
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Use the aquarium, gravel vacuum to start a siphon to start pulling water into the bucket. As the water is being pulled into the siphon, you can then clean the gravel with the end. While you are sucking water out of the aquarium, this is considered as your water change. All fish aquariums need water changes because fish give off nitrates and that needs to be removed from the tank.
When cleaning your aquarium filter, you should gently rinse the pad out of the filter in your sink. Do you wanna be careful not to overly clean the filter pad because it holds bacteria which keeps your cycle stable in your aquarium. So just lightly rinse it under a faucet or give it a couple squeezes in a bucket of water. The chlorine from your city water supply will kill the bacteria so you don’t want to overly clean it in that water. It’s always a safe route to take a bucket of water from your fish aquarium and squeeze the filter pad in that water.
Lots of fish keepers find it beneficial to buy a aquarium water changer. This hooks up to your faucet and allows you to pull water from your fish tank and also add water from the faucet. It’s a helpful device that saves you from hauling buckets of water from the sink to the aquarium to fill it. You don’t necessarily need an aquarium water changer. It just helps you from hauling the buckets of water to the tank.
When cleaning your aquarium, you should never remove the fish from the tank itself. This is a common misunderstanding that you need to remove the fish from the tank so that they don’t get stressed out. This is completely untrue and removing the fish gives them more stress than just leaving them in the tank. When you clean your aquarium what you do is you just clean around the fish while they’re still in the fish tank.
When doing aquarium water changes, you do not want to remove more than 30% off of water at one setting. If you remove too much of the water that new water you add put stress on the fishes breathing system. The new water added to the fish tank puts the fish in a bit of a shock and that’s why we don’t want too much water at once. That new water is what the fish have to get used to versus the water they were in already.
Every fish aquarium has nitrate in the water and this is the byproduct of keeping fish. We need to remove this nitrate from the water and there’s only two ways to do this. You can utilize live plants to feed a nitrates or you’re going to have to manually remove the water and add new water that has zero nitrates. The whole idea with a fish aquarium is the keep the nitrates level down below 40 ppm.
One figuring out when we have to do a water change and clean the tank we are going to test the nitrate levels. This is going to depict when we do the cleaning. If the nitrate levels are over 40 ppm and that’s when we are going to do a water change and cleaning. you’re going to want to get yourself in aquarium testing kit or test strips. Learning how to test your aquarium water for nitrate levels is fairly simple.