Getting a new pet can be an exciting time regardless of whether you are an adult or a child. The entire process of deciding which one to get can give you sleepless nights (in a good way of course). However, this excitement also means that you can often forget that caring for a pet requires a lot of responsibility.
You need to provide it with food, give it a healthy environment to grow in and of course protect it in every way possible. Unfortunately, a lot of us forget about this responsibility and end up getting the pet before realising how much really needs to be put in.
This is especially important for pets like fish. While dogs and cats can take care of their environment to a certain extend, fish aren’t able to survive if their environment isn’t clean. When you get fish as a pet, you’ll have to put them into their water tank, a place that will be their home for hopefully a long time.
They roam around these areas freely so the tank must satisfy all the necessary requirements. During the first week, of course the fish tank will look very clean with clear water. However, as time goes on, the tank will get more and more cloudy and all of a sudden, you’ve got absolutely no idea what to do.
The best thing to do is to be prepared on what is to come because a dirty tank can have a detrimental effect on the life of a fish. It can even kill them!
How to Clean a Fish Tank?
The first thing you need to do is try and form a timetable that will ensure that you’ll clean the fish tank every other week. This will ensure that everything is going according to plan and that you don’t end up getting lazy.
When it comes to cleaning the tank, you’ll need a couple of items in order to carry out the task in an efficient manner. If you have any electric devices connected to the tank then you need to unplug these. This will include things like a filter or an aerator.
The next step will be to remove any extra things that you have inside the tank. This may include any decoration pieces or electric devices. One thing to note during this step is that you must avoid disturbing the fish when you’re doing this.
Following this, you need to transfer some of the existing tank water into a smaller temporary tank. This can be a large bowl. Basically, you need to transfer the fish into this temporary bowl so that you can get started with cleaning the rest of your proper fish tank.
During the process of cleaning the tank, you need to use a water siphon in order to remove the water into a larger waste container. This process will help you to not only remove the dirty water but also remove other debris, food and any other debris in the gravel. However, you should only remove a little bit over 50% of the dirty water because you wouldn’t want to remove all the bacteria that are essential for the fish to survive.
During the next step, you need to wipe down the glass of the fish tank using something like a paper towel. It is important not to use any soap or other chemicals because they can actually be harmful for the fish. You should also rinse any of the furniture or décor items removed from the tank in the first step.
Following this, you need to place all the furniture and electrical devices back into the fish tank. After this, it will be time to fill the tank with tap water but this should be at a temperature that is as close to the original tank water as possible.
After this step, you need to plug all the electrical devices in again. Once you have done this, you need to add water conditioner and aquarium salt as stated according to the packaging of these chemicals. You need to leave these in for about 20 minutes for everything to distribute and the water temperature to balance.
After this is done, the final step should involve putting the fish back into the clean fish tank. At this step, your fish tank should look a lot cleaner than before you started cleaning this.
This is our quick guide on how to clean a fish tank. You should always try and do this every other week so as to ensure that your wish remain in the best possible environment for their survival. If you do this properly, I’m sure you’ll feel very proud of yourself.