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Aquarium Maintenance - A quick overview - Page 2

© Winston Vaughan Schoenfeld

Filter media cleaning is also a necessary part of aquarium maintenance. A good time to clean the filters in your filtration device is during the water changes. An important note that is often not known by aquarists: wash the filter media in the water that you have removed from the aquarium with the gravel vacuum. Also, do not get the filter media pristinely clean! You want to keep the bacterial colonies that are living in it. If you vigorously clean it, you will be removing all of the nitrifying bacteria that are good for your aquarium. Some of you may want to argue that in the best situation, the bacterial colonies should be living in the aquarium, not in the filter media. This is true, but it is not a perfect world, and saving as much of the good bacteria as possible will only help. As you may have guessed, the frequency at which you should do the filter media cleaning is somewhat dependent on your water changes. It is not necessary to clean the filter media every time that you do a water change, but the filter media should be checked to make sure that it is still functioning. Clean it when needed.

Assuming that you have already been through the new aquarium cycle, and the biological components of your aquarium are in good shape, you should do chemical testing of the aquarium water between water changes. I recommend once a month. This should be done on a weekend that you are not doing any water changes. This will allow you to properly check the levels in your aquarium since they may momentarily change a little for a day or so during the water changes. Proper aquariums should have no ammonia and nitrite content, and moderate to low nitrate levels. pH should also be in an acceptable range, or one should add buffer or do a water change to correct it. This holds true for both freshwater and saltwater aquariums.

At this point, I hope I have at least given you a little bit of a better idea of what is meant by aquarium maintenance. Every aquarium is slightly different, and it is really hard to generalize the whole cleaning subject as I have done. There are additional things that one may or may not need to do, so if you have any additional questions about this subject that I have not managed to touch on, please feel free to e-mail me.

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