3 Key Things to Care for when Maintaining your Aquarium

Once you set up your aquarium and it is running, you must maintain it regularly to keep it healthy and looking good.

However, don’t overdo it to the extent of rummaging about in the tank everyday for dead leaves or waste matter. This will only disturb the occupants and put them under unnecessary stress!

Fish keeping is supposed to be fun not paranoia, do the necessary with moderation. And this is just one of the key to successful fish keeping.

1. Maintaining Water Quality

Change a portion of the aquarium water each week – about 10 to 25 per cent. Trace elements are thus replenished, and accumulated toxic nitrites removed. This refreshes the aquarium, rather like letting fresh air into a stuffy room.

If you are going away for up to a week, it is best to leave your fish unfed. Friends or neighbors entrusted with the task of caring for your fish may be inexperience or over-enthusiastic and overfeed them.

If you will be away for a longer period, measure out daily portions of dried food and leave clear feeding instructions with the caregiver. Make these portions about half what you would normally feed to prevent any chance of overfeeding or water pollution during your absence.

Make an extra partial water change the day before you leave. This will help ensure good water quality until your return. Any filter maintenance work is best done a week or so before your departure to ensure that the system runs smoothly.

2. Maintaining your Filter

Never clean your filter out completely. Doing so will bring about the “new tank syndrome”, which means having to re-establish your aquarium’s nitrogen cycle* from scratch.

The less you interfere with your filter the better. Every time you do so, you eliminate a lot of filter bacteria necessary for sustaining the nitrogen cycle. This increases the risks of ammonia and nitrite problems during the gradual recovery of the system.

If you are using canister, box or trickle filters, clean or replace no more than half, or preferably, one-third of the media at a time.

For sponge filters, squeeze them once or twice in a bucket of aquarium water.

If undergravel filters are used, do not disturb the substrate unless it is absolutely necessary. Avoid the practice of “vacuuming” the substrate with a gravel cleaner every week, as this prevents the filter from functioning efficiently.

To reduce the loading on your filter following maintenance, reduce feeding for a day or two beforehand, and two to three days afterwards, to reduce the level of waste output from your fish.

3. Maintaining the Plants

Avoid adding fertilizers as this will cause a nitrate surge. If the plants do need feeding, use pellet-type fertilizers inserted into the substrate next to the plant. One or two of these pellets per plant every four to eight weeks should be adequate.

Prune overgrown foliage and remove dead leaves regularly.

Special Note: The nitrogen cycle is a natural process in which poisonous nitrites produced by ammonia – which is in turn produced by rotting food, fish wastes, decaying plant and other organic matter – is converted by nitrogen-fixing bacteria into relatively harmless nitrates through biochemical oxidation.

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