How to Clean a Goldfish Tank

Here we have Dippy and Dopey's aquarium. It's a three-foot tank and it is absolutely filthy. You can barely see through it. The water inside is clean but I've allowed the algae to build up which now needs to be, well, scraped away and the filters need cleaning. Let's clean this tank together. The algae is very thick. Let's have a look from inside the tank. There we can see the fish from above but we can see the sides of the tank are completely green so we're going to have to scrape all of that away. Now I will be using this little scraper here to scrape it away. Let's get an angle here and start scraping. Starting to scrape away. Let's get all that scraped away. This glass nice and clean. That is the front pane of glass nicely scraped. Now I don't scrape the sides or the back as the goldfish like to nibble on that but now we've got all this murky water and what we also need to do is clean those two sponge filters. We've got one sponge filter there and the other one there so we get those out and into some buckets. Okay, we're going to try removing the sponge filters one-handed. Chances are the phones are going to go into the water. There's Dopey and Leia. Dippy's hiding. Dippy's there at the back. Let's grab this sponge filter. There's the sponge filter. Yeah, I don't think I can remove this one-handed. Okay, there is both sponge filters in the bucket and we're going to siphon out water from the tank into the bucket to give those sponge filters a good clean in tank water and we're going to be very careful not to siphon up any of the goldfish or disturbing the very deep substrate substrate layer. So get all this up. Now that I've siphoned some of the water out of the aquarium and into the buckets with the sponges in, I can begin cleaning the sponges. Now if I put my hand straight into this bucket and give the sponge a squeeze, the water's going to go everywhere which is probably one of the reasons my floor's quite often wet but now I'm going to get rid of some of this water and then start squeezing the sponges clean. Now we just squeeze the sponges clean. Put your hand in and give them a good squeeze and as I said that I've got water everywhere and you will slowly get all of that detritus and goldfish poo but that water is basically completely blacky brown and we will do this with both sponges and using all the water. I'm actually going to take some more water out of the aquarium to get the mixture clean. A quick look from above with the tank quite a way empty. There's Dopey, our rescue fish. Look at the size of it. Absolutely massive and then we have Dippy, our other rescue fish that's got a broken peduncle. He was rescued at the same time as Dopey and here we have Leia, a pearl scale goldfish. It's got a pearl scale goldfish from Ping Pong Pearl Scales. If you'd love a pearl scale beauty like this head over to pingpongpearlscales.com or if you want any imported fish go to pingpongpearlscales.com. He's the best goldfish importer in England. So there we have the goldfish from above. So we're going to be putting those nice and clean back into the tank. I can't do it one-handed but give it a quick go. So you just sort of put it in like that and then attach the base which is in there. There's our sponge filter. We just put it in there. There's the base all nice and clean. Click it into place and then put it down there. Now to refill it. We could refill it using individual buckets but that will take forever. So I have a water butt in the fish room full of water of the same temperature that's already been dechlorinated and add all the heavy metals removed. So we'll just put there that like that and hope it doesn't flood the room. Go turn on the water. Okay tank is nearly refilled. That red line there is the maximum. So we just wait until the water gets there and then shut it off. Okay nearly there. So we head over to the shut off button which is here. Keeping an eye on it from here. Nearly there, nearly there. I can do this from an app on my phone but I'm using the phone to record so a little bit more difficult to do it. Okay it's there. Turn off the water. I also recommend getting a cleaning cloth with a bit of white vinegar on it and just wiping the outside of the glass. Being very careful not to get any on the inside. But there we have it. A beautifully clean goldfish tank with the three fish being quite happy. They do like to graze on the algae at the back so I don't clear that off. Let's have a little closer look at them. Hello Dodie. At the back we've got Dippy and then Leia aiming to eat something probably attached to the filter. Let's see them from above. If you'd like to see more of our goldfish journey growing some beautiful goldfish on and attending shows please subscribe to the channel and if you'd like any of the goldfish that I've bred please get in contact. I'm pretty sure we'll be able to post out at some point next year. At the moment we can only do local pickup here in Whitstable, Kent, England.