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Summary: Among aquarium cleaning tools, a gravel vac is one of the more important tools because it helps to get debris out of the gravel. Learn about algae cleaning pads and filter brushes with help from the owner of a pet store in this free video on fish aquarium cleaning tools.
Mike Mavro is the owner and operator of Orvee's Pet Center in St. Petersburg, Fla. He has dedicated more than three decades to the care, maintenance, health and well-being of fish and...read more
"Hi. My name is Michael and today we're going to talk about maintaining that new aquarium you have and the proper aquarium cleaning tools. One thing that's really important and I think one of your most important tools, is your gravel vac. Gravel vacs are very important because it's going to help get the debris out of the gravel and this is the way you are going to do your water changes. We also end up with unsightly algae on our glass or our acrylic aquariums. So, there's a lot of different products like that. There's different scrubber pads, algae cleaning pads. It's really important that you know whether you have a glass aquarium or an acrylic aquarium because each pad is going to be different for that particular type of surface. There's also brushes available and these are going to help clean your filters out, your intake tubes and so forth. And if you've got larger filters, there's larger brushes available as well. One of the glass cleaners that I really like is the magna-float. I like to keep it parked on the side of my aquarium so during the month, if I end up with any algae anywhere, I can take it over, clean that up, and park it back over to the side. The thing that I like about the magna-float is if it comes undone, it floats to the surface and all I have to do is bring it back over to catch it and I'm ready to go again. Now, your gravel siphon, what you're going to do with that, is you're going to get yourself a bucket and your siphon. They're really really easy to use. All you need to do is set them into your aquarium and most of them are self-siphon starters. So this particular one, we shake it, stop until we got water flow and then we start going in through our gravel. And you move through really quickly to siphon the debris out of that gravel. And I recommend water changes to be done once a month and only do a 25% water change. So this particular tank, I'd bring it down to about right here and that way, I'm not going to remove too much of the beneficial bacteria. If I do that once a month, I'm going to maintain a nice, healthy aquarium. My name is Michael. Today we were talking about maintaining your new aquarium with the proper aquarium cleaning tools."
eHow Article: Aquarium Cleaning Tools
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