How to Change a Saltwater Fish Tank Filter

Video Transcript

"Well from time to time you're going to have to change your cartridges in your filter or possibly just inspect them and clean them up a little bit. Today my filter looks pretty good as far as the strainer's clean, the water's flowing good. I'm not going to unplug this to do this. I'm going to take the cover off, I'll rinse the cover off and clean it because there's some salt spray on it. And I'm just going to wipe off a little bit of the salt spray that's on the filter. This is an Aqueon 55. It's a relatively new filter. I kind of like them for both fresh and salt water. One of the features is it has a grid. It's a bio-grid that helps aerate the water. That's going to need a little bit of cleaning. Now I don't want to take it to the sink and clean it and kill out the beneficial bacterias growing on it but I do want to get some of the algaes and stuff that are stuck on there. So I'm basically just going to brush it a little bit. And dip it in some water I'm taking from the tank. And I can put it back. If I can figure out how to put it back. Actually it goes in only one way. Now the cartridge comes in a little bio-grid also. The bio-grid, there's no need to do anything on it, the little things growing on there are tuna kits and their perfectly safe to have in the tank. And I'll just put that grid back in place and this is the cartridge. Now ordinarily what I would do with the cartridge is just, also just rinse it in some water taken from the tank and place it back in the tank. That would maintain the bacteria, the beneficial bacteria that's growing on it. But in this case this cartridge looks pretty beat so I'm going to just replace it with a new one which I'm rinsed already in the sink. And this only goes back one way. There's a little slot that tells you where it goes. It also says front on the cartridge so voil? that's it. This one comes with two cartridges. The other cartridge I will just rinse in the water from the tank. Too anxious to change cartridges and keep the filter clean. Always clean, if possible clean everything from the filter with water from the tank instead of running through the sink. Of course the cover I can wash in tap water. That's not really going to help biological activity. There's a little algae growing on here. I'll also grab my scrungee pad and just wipe that free. And actually seems to be okay. And that's basically all there is to changing a salt water filter."