How to Clean an Aquarium

Video Transcript

"Maintaining a fish aquarium is a lot easier than many believe it is. We're going to talk about how to clean your aquarium. My name is Michael, and we're going to do that. First step that you want to do when you clean your aquarium, is you want to remove the plants, that are out of there. They need to be cleaned on a regular basis, a monthly basis, so we're just going to take them all out. I have my handy bucket here. I'm just going to place them right in there. I have my other plant here, and any ornaments are going to need to come out as well. The second thing that you're going to do, is you're going to make sure that you unplug your filter. You don't want your filter to run dry, when we remove some of the water out of here. Gravel siphoning is very important, when we're cleaning our aquarium, so you have your bucket, and this is a gravel siphon. What we're going to do, is we're going to remove twenty five percent of this water, and it's really important that we stay in that area, twenty five to about a third. If we start removing more of that water, then we're taking a lot of the good bacteria that we need in that tank, so very simply, if you have a gravel siphon that's self starting, you stick it in there. You get your siphon going, and you start to go down into your gravel, and you'll see that I have a lot of the debris that's in the gravel, that's now starting to be sucked up, and I'm going to move quickly through the aquarium. It's real important that I get it clean, but I want to keep going through there, making sure I get everything out, and I'm going to continue doing that, until I reach the twenty five percent mark. The other thing that you're going to do, once you've done that, is your filter needs to be cleaned as well. The filter pad itself, again, take it out, stick it in your bucket. That's going to need to be changed. We change that out once a month. The filter, we're going to remove everything from the filter, and this particular one has a different type of motor on it, that actually goes into the water. Most of them are built inside,and then use your brushes, and you just clean out all of the tubes themselves. Once you have all of that done, you place your plants back in there. Get your water set up for it. Put the proper chemicals in it. Get your filter set back up, plug it in, and you're all ready to go, until next month. It's very easy. It shouldn't take you more than maybe about a half hour to get your tank clean, so enjoy your aquarium, and remember, take about a quarter of the water out, no more than a third. My name is Michael, and keep your aquarium clean."