Aquarium Maintenance - How to Clean a Fish Tank by Pondguru

Hello, I'm Richard from Tyne Valley Aquatics, and in this video I'm going to briefly talk about tank maintenance. This is just a basic weekly maintenance that you would do on your tank, and it's going to involve cleaning the glass, cleaning the gravel, and doing a bit of a water change. Ideally, the first thing you want to do is get an algae pad, your hand inside the tank, and with small circular motions, remove all the algae that's clinging to the inside of the tank. And once you've done that, Let that settle on the bottom and then you're on to phase two. The next step is to use a bucket to catch the water that you're going to be draining out and a gravel cleaner. This is just a simple tube which goes in your tank, you suck on the end or you can get ones that start themselves automatically when you shake them. Once you put that end into the bucket after you've sucked it creates a siphon which will draw the water out of your tank and then this big end you shove in the gravel It stirs the gravel up, and it removes all the organic waste, i.e. fish muck, uneaten food, and that comes out with the water into your bucket, like this. That's it, the siphon's going now. Push that in there, you can see all the muck going up the tube. Gravel's getting stirred up, and what you want to do is go around the whole of the base of your tank, stirring up the gravel, removing all the muck. You can also move rocks out of the way. You might have to stop the siphon for a minute, move your rocks out of the way, and then get back in with the siphon. It's pretty important to move the rocks, maybe it's not every week, but at least every other week, because they attract a lot of muck, they trap a lot of muck underneath them. If you just skirt around them, you're going to be missing a lot of muck that's underneath there. Okay, you've gone around your whole tank with the gravel cleaner, you've removed as much muck as you can, and if you notice, it's dropped the water by about 15, maximum 20%, you don't really want to do any more than that weekly. That needs to be topped up with fresh water. Unless you've got access to a spring, which won't have any nasty sort of treatment chemicals in, you'll be using water out of the tap. Therefore, when you're topping up that little bit of water there, you'll need something to make the harmful chemicals that are in tap water safe. There's one from Tetra there, AquaSafe, API Stress Coat, Nutrafin Aqua Plus. They all do pretty much the same job. They basically make the water safe. If your tank's less than six months old, or you've got a bit of a problem with ammonia or nitrite, you may want to add a bacterial treatment to the water that you're adding back to your tank, one called StressZyme there, Cycle, and there's a host of other products as well. And what they basically do is add live bacteria to your aquarium, which will help to mature the filter very quickly, and it'll also consume ammonia and nitrite. Now that you've done your gravel clean, Chances are you've slopped water all down the front of the tank. It's what happens in the shop all the time. So there'll be water stains developing on here. And to clean the front of your tank, all you use is two bits of paper towel. One's wet, one's dry. With the wet one, you scrub off all the water marks. And with the dry one, you dry up any residue and polish it. No chemicals. You don't want to use any polishes or anything in case they get in the water. Now obviously I've shown you how to clean out a fish tank that's got an under gravel filter. This is the only sort of filter that's in this tank. You'd still need to clean the gravel if you had any other sort of filtration, whether it's external or internal. In external and internal filters, all you would do, take the end off, remove the sponge, squeeze that sponge out in the water that you've dropped out your tank, put your sponge back, end on, stick that back in your tank and set it away. By washing the sponge in the internal filter or your external filter out in your tank water, You're maintaining a lot of the good bacteria that's living on the foam. If you wash the sponge out under the tap in chlorinated water, the chlorine kills all the bacteria in your sponge, and it's just like starting again with a new filter. If you've killed the bacteria in your filter off, you set that away back in your tank, and you've got a tank full of fish, it's basically just like starting from scratch, because you'll have a filter which isn't working at all, but you'll have a tank full of fish. So really, in essence, it's worse than starting from scratch, because those fish are going to be producing waste, and the filter, because it's going to be devoid of bacteria, isn't going to be able to process that waste. So pollution levels are going to rise, your fish are going to gasp, and possibly die. So really, whether it's under gravel, internal filter, or external filter, maintenance is all about maintaining a pretty good level of bacteria in your filter, whilst removing the organic waste. So what about a tank with sand in. I'm always going on in my videos about not using gravel for tropical aquariums because it raises the pH. Sand always works better. Your little loaches, cories and so on like to feed on and in sand. So how do you clean that? Well the process is pretty much the same. First thing you would do is go in with your algae pad, remove all the algae from the inside of your tank and the next thing you do you stick your hand in or a net, Stir up all the sand. If it's deep, you really need to give it a good old stir up. Any organic muck, any fish waste, any uneaten food, will go into suspension. Give it a few minutes, maybe it's an hour. It'll settle back down on top of the sand and create a film of organic matter on top of the sand. And then all you do is just get in with your gravel cleaner. Pretty much the same way as you did with the gravel, except you don't shove this right into the sand because it'll just suck the sand up. You hover it about half an inch over the top of your sand you've got to have a fairly steady hand and what that does it just sucks the organic waste which is lighter than the sand up off the top with a bit of water down into your bucket. So you would go around the whole of the bottom of your tank in a similar way as you would with a gravel bottom tank gently removing all the organic waste off the top. You will of course remove some of the sand if you remove it to a point whereby You've just dropped this in here, gone to answer the phone, come back, you've sucked half the sand out, replace it with new sand. If you don't fancy getting your hands in the tank to scrub the algae off the insides, there is another way. That's an algae magnet. That one goes on the outside, that one goes on the inside, and importantly, that one floats. So if you lose it, it floats to the top and you can catch it again easily. I would always go for the floating one because if you get a sinking one and you lose it, Drops down into the gravel or sand, you go down to pick it up, you get gravel or sand sandwiched in there, clean your glass and it scratches the inside of your tank. Always go for the floating one. You just use this in a similar way to you would use the little algae pad, small circles, which scrubs the inside of the tank. It actually washes a few of the water stains off the outside of the tank as well, but you still will need to go on with a paper towel after you've used this and clean the front of the tank. So that's it. Pretty simple set of rules for cleaning both sand bottomed and gravel tanks, it always pays to do that every week, drop a little bit of water out every week, do your gravel clean or sand clean every week, if you leave it two weeks and do a great big water change you're upsetting the balance that's in the tank, you're changing the water parameters by adding new water, if you can maintain the balance by only taking small amounts of water out whilst at the same time removing the waste then your fish are going to be a lot happier and healthier. Thanks for watching.