How To Clean Your Aquarium

How do I clean my aquarium?

After you've done a test on your water chemistry and you find out it's time to do a service, or a cleaning on your aquarium, if you have a bucket to drain water into, that would be a good idea. Or, if you're near a sink you could do it that way. You're going to start your siphon, start gently gravel vacuuming the aquarium and taking it down anywhere between 25 and 40 percent, depending on how frequently you're doing the service. Once you're done with that, what I typically have people do is a lot of people ask me, "Do I take the fish out?" No. You've got two thirds of the water, or half of the water left. The fish are just going to go down to the bottom where the water is. Now, you can't take all day to do this, obviously, because you've got your pumps off. You're going to turn your pumps and your heater and everything off to begin with when you're doing the service. Then, you go through the gravel vac. You then want to scrub the surfaces of the glass and get the algae off of that. If you don't like the algae on the decorations themselves, you can pull them out and soak them in hot water to get them out. Then, you would redecorate your tank and refill it with water that's the same temperature as your tap, that's already in your aquarium. You can do that by feel or by using a thermometer. Also, you want to dechlorinate that water, fill it back up, and you're done.