The We Are Pets Blog

Dirty fish tank??

Posted on 23 February 2010

So how do we go about cleaning a dirty fish tank?

Well if your tank gets into a bad state, first things first we would use an algae cleaner to clean the algae off the front, on algae cleaners there is a soft side and a rough side, the rough side goes inside the tank, just move it over and you will see the algae is removed. Most magnet cleaners will float so if you happen to leave it off and thus break the magnetic connection it will float to the top. The next thing we need to do is use a gravel cleaner and we would start it off just by a syphon action so what we do is fill the gravel cleaner up make sure there is no air in the cleaner and put your finger on the other end and point into a bucket, the syphon action then start, then put the gravel cleaner back into the gravel and you will see the muck coming up. We dont want to be taking too much of this muck out because a lot of it is good bacteria and it acts as a compost heap which breaks down all the muck which the fish are producing so we tend to take out around half of the gravel and we do this probably once every three or four weeks. You will see the difference between the water in the tank and in your bucket, because the muck is a fertiliser it feeds the algae and hence the algae grows so if we dont remove it we will get lots of algae so this does need to be done at least once a month. In a normal tank we would take out around about 25% of the water, we would then top the water back up using a declorinator, no need to warm it, it should be fine so long as we dont go above 25%.

We can also cut down on algae by cutting the light time down, algae needs light to grow, now the light unless you are using real plants is for our benefit not the fishes so simply by having the light on at night rather than all day will also help cut down on algae.

Declorinator is used for two reasons:- firstly it puts a protective lining on the fishes gills so the chloride which is a bleach doesnt burn their gills but more importantly tap water straight out of the tap has a lot of chlorine in and will kill filter bacteria and thats the thing we need to preserve so by putting in Aquasafe in the water these problems will be avoided. Another thing we can put in there is Algae clear and that helps keep nitrates under control, nitrates feed algae so by putting algae clear in your filter will work really well.

A lot of people say "oh we dont need to clean our tank, my tank has been perfect for the last 6 months and we have never cleaned it" and then a new fish is added and that fish gets diseased and passes on disease to the other fish and commonly then the customer will come back saying " I've put the fish in my tank and it has died and I have had no problems for 6 months" the reason for that is because the nitrates have not been removed, the nitrate will be really high in your tank and the existing fish have got use to it and then a new fish is introduced which is not used to nitrate and that fish will then get disease and most likely die and pass that disease on to the other fish so it is very important that we do at least a 20% water change once a month you can do smaller changes more frequently if you wanted.