Welcome to Gaia! ::

What you're doing is basically the gyst of it. You also want to clean out your filter pad when you do your water changes. Do this by swishing it around in a bucket of dirty tank water and squeezing it out. This will get most of the gunk and solid waste out without killing all of your bacteria.

The best way to clean your decorations is to take them out and scrub them. Get a sponge or toothbrush specifically for your fish and put them all in a bucket or something and scrub away. Then rinse (again in dirty tank water) and put them back in your tank.

And of course, the best thing overall for your fish is water changes. An article I was reading suggests weekly or daily 80% changes. You don't need to go that far, but the bigger and more frequent the changes the better.

Well, I wouldn't do a 100% change, because that can upset the fish if everything isn't perfect (temps, params, etc), but other than that, bigger and more frequent changes are more effective. I have the digital edition of tfh as well as the print one, so I'll see if I can't copy the article on water changes and send it to you or post it here later. And yeah, don't use your tooth brush for tank decorations. Unless you want to potentially get sick =P I have a few toothbrushes for tank use only that I was using before I got a scrubber, and now I don't even use that because my pleco keeps my tank very clean of algae.

I knew they were ravenous algae eaters, but I was shocked when I put my pleco in. He's only a pint-sized bristlenose, but my goodness! My large driftwood chunk was almost completely covered in a nice-looking, compact variety of hair algae (purposefully for looks, mind you) which took months to propogate, and within the first day in the tank he ate every last bit of it. I didn't have the heart to be mad at the cute little bugger, though!


Another invaluable tool is one of those "pipe cleaner" style brushes that have what is basically a spring for a handle. It is good to rip apart your filter every once in a while because goop can build up on the inside of the intake tubes and around the impeller compartment. This reduces the water flow through your filter, and the strain on the motor can cause it to give out before it's time. With one of those brushes, you shove it inside the tube and it zips around the bends in the tubing, and you can bend the brush head to get into the little corners of the filter. I don't know what I did before, that brush makes things sooo much easier! Brushes like these don't work so well, the handle is too stiff to get into those difficult places easily, not too mention you only need 1 brush if it is a good one. This is the one I use, and it's the only one I need!

You don't want to over do it on the filter compartment cleaning for the same reason as the filter pads, you can kill or wipe off the bacteria you want in there. Obviously, it is unavoidable when you do have to break down and clean, but it is best to clean the different areas at different times to avoid a crash caused by too much bacteria killed at once. My schedule is usually something like:

Intake strainer: As needed, sometimes multiple times a week and every water change. Prevents a blockage to water flow, and prevents thin, long filaments from sneaking past the strainer (I'm looking at you Camboba and bagless filter floss stare ) They can wreak havoc on your impeller if they get wrapped around it.

Intake tubing: Once every 2 months or so, any build up should take a long time to ever be something bad enough to cause problems.

Filter pad compartment: same as above, but always alternated and done a few weeks apart from the tubing to prevent a massive bacteria kill-off.

Impeller compartment: Every time you do a water change, pull out the impeller, inspect it, and clean it with a brush. Not as important if you don't have plants which can sneak those strong stem filaments and broken roots inside the filter, but all sorts of things can happen. If you have dogs or cats, for example, a few stray hairs can be enough to jam up your impeller and cause problems. Any time you hear your filter's normal sounds change, it is also good to check the impeller. The sound may be higher pitched, louder, or a make a "rattling" kind of noise, which may indicate a blockage, or it is not sitting right in it's slot (especially with cheap filters they may have fits where they just want to be noisy, so don't worry if you can't find anything obviously wrong.) Keep in mind that there are no moving parts outside of the impeller itself, the impeller is a magnet which has no actual mechanical relationship with the motor itself. It doesn't operate like a car motor, for example, where everything is attached to everything else with bars, pins, hoses, etc. The motor will "do it's thing" regardless of what the impeller is doing, so a slightly gunked-up impeller is not necessarilly detrimental to your filter's well-being, although the bacteria may not be appreciative of the reduced water flow. Conversely, if the impeller/magnet stops moving or is severely restricted, then you may run into some problems and possibly a burned out motor because the motor continues to run.


Like Vanilla mentioned, water changes can be detrimental to your fish. I am of the opinion that "bigger is not always better," but how much water to change and with what frequency depends on your water and your fish. Some fish, such as rams, tend to do best with lots of water changes while catfish indigenous to murky, dirty rivers don't care anywhere near as much.

What matters the most is the parameters of the water you are adding. For example, my well water kills fish in short order. It has NO hardness ions whatsoever, so with a dkh of 0 there is obviously also no buffering capacity at all. The ph is also so low I don't have the ability to test for it, all I know is that it is below 5.8. If I put my water in a fish tank, if the fish don't die from ph shock outright, the lack of buffering capacity makes the ph shoot up to above 8.6 within about 7 hours or so. Since I have to use so many additives to make my aquarium liveable, I only do small water changes to prevent any measurement miscalculations from wreaking havoc on the aquarium. Particularly because I have well-water straight from the ground, the parameters change (especially when we are switching from dry seasons to wet seasons) and because they are usually off the charts, most of what I add is done so with alot of guesswork, a little luck, and a dash of instinct developed over 20 years.

Particularly when considering your dkh and trace element levels, if you don't use additives it may be best to do frequent but small water changes. There are alot of minerals in the water which most people don't test for which are important to a fish's health. Here is a link to an article that gives a general overview of water chemistry, as well as contains many link to other articles describing how this chemistry affects the body of a fish (see the "do fish drink?" link.) If the water you are adding is not close to what is already in the aquarium, you may be doing more harm than good.

I'm certainly not saying that having fresh water is not good for fish, but just because water comes from a tap doesn't mean it is good for your fish. Many people don't realize there may be something wrong because they have the idea in their head that all fish only live for a year or two at most. While the fish may not die off outright, after a few years of malnourishment (fish draw many nutrients from the water, rather than almost exclusively from their food like land creatures) and stress their bodies give out prematurely. For example, if a person's cories and plecos are not living longer than the family dog (at least 10 years to almost 30 years for some corys!) they may not be giving their fish the best living conditions.

What matters the most when considering water changes is that there is an appropriate level of minerals, nutrients, and hardness. Ph tends to follow suit behind hardness and is the easiest parameter to manipulate. If you are one of the lucky few whose tap water is exactly what is appropriate for your fish then water change away, and the more the better! If you are like most of us, be gentle but frequent with them and be careful with your additives and your testing. And most importantly--watch your fish's behavior and use your experience to judge what is best in your own tank! wink We all have different water and fish to work with, what works for one person may be disastrous for another! Take advice when you are new, but observe, experiment, and document to come up with what works for you to have a healthy aquarium. Besides, as I'm sure you've noticed, us old fuddy-duddies are stuck in our own ways, we'll rarely agree and seem to love to confuse the "newbies!" Not on purpose, of course. wink


Removing everything, fish, decorations, water and all! wink I used to do this about once a year back before I kept plants in my tank, but if you have plants and a protein skimmer for organics (or carbon filtration,) this should break down and process detritus and organic matter. After water changes and a little gravel-vac to clean up anything the plants and fish can't process themselves, a complete break down is unnecessary. The only time it may be advisable is if you get some really nasty disease in the tank, although in many cases even these may be eradicated from the tank environment itslef by removing the fish to a quarantine--the "bugs" can often be destroyed by simply not having a host to complete their life-cycle.


Remove the algae first! When you scrub it off, it simply resettles elsewhere, and releases spores into the water. Scrape it off, then suck it up with the vac. You will never get all of it, but you'll notice a difference in regrowth!


If you have plants, be careful of the roots! Stunting their growth is worse for the ecology of the tank than refraining from really getting down deep into the gravel. Use the vac to suck up gunk on top of the gravel, rather than jamming it down deep into the gravel if you are vacuuming around the plants. They will thank you by using the excess gunk as fertilizer! To an extent, of course. If you really have a problem with gunk, you may want to lay off the feeding a tad.