By: E.Schneider
If you want to have an Aquarium and keep fish, you are going to have to learn how to properly clean the fish tank.
Cleaning a fish tank requires 3 items:A 5 gallon bucketA hoseA bag of sea salt
Cleaning your Fish Tank is broken into 2 parts the tank and the filters.
The first thing you need to do is to turn off and unplug the Aquariums heater. Always remember to never stick your hand in the tank when the heater is on, a small crack in the heaters glass can be more then enough to kill you if water gets to the element.
After you have unplugged the heater wait at least 20 minutes for the heater to cool down, never take a hot heater out of the water. If you have a submersible heater after unplugging I move it to the bottom of the tank.
Before removing any water from the fish tank remove any thing in the tank such as a castle or large rocks. If you have small stones on the bottom of the tank with your hand stir up the rocks so that any trapped waste or food particles get mixed up into the water.
I you do not want to get your hand wet you can purchase what is called a gravel cleaner.
Essentially this is a hose on the end of a hard plastic tube. All you have to do is place the tube in the tank and start a siphon into the bucket.
Then push the plastic tube into the rocks to the bottom of the tank, and every 2 seconds move the tube without removing it from the water to another point in the rocks until you have removed about 10 to 15 percent of the tanks water from the tank into the bucket. It is important to put the water in the bucket and not into a sink you will need this water latter.
Now it I time to clean the filter. Inside of a filter you can have many different things, the best filter have room for biological growth materials like clay chips, a sponge and room for other materials like carbon or crushed coral. The materials can be switched depending on the needs of the tank.
Take all the materials out of the tank and place them in the bucket with the dirty water from the tank. Most of the materials will just need a good shaking out in the water to clean them, but the sponge you will need to wring out in the bucket several times to get clean. You bay be thinking why not clean them with clean water. The dirty water, the materials and the sponge has micro organisms that help the tank and by breaking down waste, so by not cleaning them in fresh water you are cleaning out the dirt but not destroying the biological cycle of the tank.
Next you will have to put everything back in the filters, and in the tank. Make sure you place all the materials back in the filter and rocks and things into the tank.
The next thing to do is to pour about 1 cup of sea salt in the tank for every 50 gallons of water. Do this before replacing the water in the tank. Filling the tank will stir up the water and help dissolve the salt.
Make sure that the water you put in the tank is the same temperature as the water already in the tank. The best way to do this is to fill the bucket with hot water and wait for its temperature to fall to the same as the tank then. Slowly pour the water in and restart your filters.
The cleaning of the filters should be done every 2 weeks but the cleaning of the tank must be done on the same day every week to keep your fish healthy and stress free.
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