The key to having health and happy fish swimming in your tank is proper maintenance. This is done on a daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly basis. By keeping up with your maintenance tasks, you can help prevent fish stress caused by any irregularity in their environment. The goal is to make sure that the fish tank lives up to the living requirements of your tropical fish. Here’s a short guide.
Daily maintenance
The daily tasks involved in taking care of tropical fish tanks are simple. These are checking if your fish are complete and healthy, spotting and removing dead fish and dead plant matter, and examining the temperature readings of your heater and thermometer. The temperature readings should match. Otherwise, it could mean that there is something wrong with your heater.
You should also check the water level. If it has dropped, replace the evaporated water to prevent salinity and pH levels from fluctuating.
Weekly maintenance
Every week, tropical fish tanks need to be cleaned and its water changed. Dirty decorations should be removed and cleaned, while live plants should be pruned and re-anchored. The tank walls should also be cleaned, and floating particles and gravel dirt should be siphoned out. After cleaning, remove 25% of the aquarium water. Replace it with new water but make sure that it is filtered, aerated, and dechlorinated first. The temperature of the new water should also be the same as with the water in the tank.
Monthly maintenance tasks
Tropical fish tanks need a more thorough cleaning every month. Aside from cleaning the tanks’ insides and the other weekly tasks, you will also need to clean the filter media and refill filter cartridges. You should test all aquarium equipment during this time. Do your monthly cleaning the same time as the water change. This way, you will be able to use the discarded water in cleaning the filter media. You do not have to clean the biological media. Only the mechanical and chemical filter media need to be cleaned. To finish your monthly maintenance, do some testing on the pH levels, ammonia, nitrates, and nitrites levels.
More importantly, check and monitor the pH levels, along with the nitrates, ammonia, and nitrites in the fish tank. Making sure that they are at their proper level will keep the fish healthy and thriving. Make it a habit to jut down all your observations so you can use them as reference for any problem you might have with tropical fish tanks.
Bi-annual maintenance
The pumps, light bulbs, protein skimmers, filters, and pipes of tropical fish tanks are to be checked, cleaned and/or replaced twice a year. Check the impeller of the pumps if there are missing blades or if it has cracks. Be sure to clean the inside of the pipes. When you change the light bulbs, do so at night when they are cool enough to be handled. If you need to change two bulbs or more, replace the bulbs one day at a time. When removing, reassembling, and reinstalling these equipment, follow the manufacturers instructions.
Cleaning tools
To complete the task diligently, arm yourself with the needed tools for maintenance. Among them are the algae pads, gravel vacuums, scrapers, tongs, gloves, tongs, and magnetic cleaners. Also use cleaning fluids such as salt creep removers, lime dissolvers, and glass polishers.
Greg Simms is a pet store owner and an aquarium enthusiast who likes to help others succeed in growing their fish as well. He is a featured associate and invited speaker at many aquarium organizations. He knows also of and .
