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Starting Up a Freshwater Aquarium

Complete guide on how to set up a freshwater aquarium. This is a guide where I’m just gonna go over basically everything you need to know. That is why I don’t film downstairs. I’m sorry if there’s screaming in the background I have three birds and they’re loud. so for today’s video I’m going to be giving you guys a complete guide on everything you need to know to set up your very own freshwater aquarium. This is a guide that will be especially good for beginners who do not know anything about aquariums. Even if you think you know about aquariums there’s a lot of misinformation that is spread.

This is going to be a very long video because there’s a lot of information to go over. But if you’re serious about starting an aquarium then please watch the entire video without skipping. Because all of the information I’m about to give you is very necessary and you do not want to miss anything because if you do something wrong then you can mess up your entire aquarium and end up killing your fish and you’ll be very sad.

Research freshwater aquarium choices

It’s a very large misconception that keeping aquariums is easy or that it’s like one of the easier pets to have. Because the thing is with aquariums is first of all if you get all the right equipment. It can be very expensive. My most expensive animals out of everything I have, out of my dogs, my birds my reptiles, out of everything my fish tanks cost the most money to start up. They can be the most confusing to maintain. When I first started this aquarium back here – this is my first aquarium I started.

When I was researching like how to start an aquarium I was so overwhelmed with all this information. I was just so confused because there’s so much stuff you need to know. It’s so hard to find a complete video that literally tells you everything you need to know. Or a complete guide online that tells you everything you need to know. So I’m gonna try my best to give you guys all the information you need to start your very own aquarium. And I’m gonna go into details.

Types of aquarium

So like I said please stick with me through this entire video because it’s all very important information. I don’t want to sit here and make the intro like ten minutes. So we’re just gonna get straight into it. I’m gonna try to list links to buy all of the products I mentioned in this video down in the description. If you use the links I put down below it will take you to an Amazon link. And I would really appreciate it.

Freshwater aquariums

The first thing you need to think of when starting an aquarium is what kind of aquarium do you want to have. Also what fish do you want to have. There are basically four basic categories you can divide different types of aquariums into. That being a freshwater tropical aquarium which is what I have back here. It’s a freshwater aquarium and it’s tropical meaning that you want the temperature to be around 78 degrees. So that just means that the fish living in here come from a tropical environment where there’s warmer water.

Cold water aquariums

Cold water aquarium which basically means an aquarium that is around 65 to 72 degrees which is usually room temperature. If your house is very warm then you might need a water cooler to cool down the water. This is an aquarium that people usually keep goldfish or koi fish if they’re not in a pond. The thing with this is goldfish and koi fish do need large fish tanks. You cannot keep them in a bowl. They need large fish tanks and need cold water.

Saltwater aquariums

There’s saltwater tanks with obviously salt water. Something I’m not gonna be discussing in this video. Then there’s brackish fish tanks which isn’t very common. A brackish fish tank is a fish tank that is basically a mixture of salt water and fresh water. It’s like a freshwater tank but there’s salt added to it. But not enough salt for it to be a saltwater tank.

Brackish water aquariums

There aren’t a whole lot of fish that live in brackish water and it can also be a very difficult aquarium to maintain. So basically in this video I’m going to be talking about mainly freshwater tropical aquariums. But the information I use can also be applied to a goldfish or a koi fish tank, that’s cold water. You just want to not have a heater in your tank obviously because the water is cold.

We’ve decided on making a freshwater tropical aquarium and these are the supplies you need. And I’m gonna go more into detail again throughout this video on how to actually apply these supplies to your freshwater aquarium. But the basic things you need obviously are your tank, a filter, a heater, filter media a siphon, substrate, lighting, decorations, water conditioner, a test kit, a thermometer. Obviously your fish food, which you can get as flake food or frozen food and then optionally you could have an air pump which just helps add more oxygen to the water. We’re gonna get into that a little bit later though.

Choosing a freshwater aquarium

So first and foremost is choosing a tank. You need to choose what size tank you want. What I have back here is a 60 gallon tank. Basically a general rule of thumb when choosing a tank is you want to think about in the back of your mind what fish you want to get because obviously the more efficient the bigger tank you need, the bigger fish you want the bigger tank you need. Towards the end of this video I’m gonna get into how to actually choose what fish you want.

When choosing a tank it’s important to realize that believe it or not the bigger fish tank you have the easier it is maintain and the reason for this is because the more water in the tank the longer it will take for the water to get dirty or for something to go wrong. If you have a five gallon fish tank a lot can go wrong very fast when you only have five gallons of water. But if you have let’s say 60 gallons of water it’ll take a lot longer for problems to arise and get to a point where they’re really bad.

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Larger aquariums are best

Usually you’ll notice them when it’s in its earlier stages of developing in a larger tank. Whereas in a smaller fish tank things can just go wrong very fast. So for beginners I actually would recommend getting a bigger tank. You don’t necessarily have to get a 60 gallon tank. That might be a little bit overwhelming for some people. But I would recommend getting around a twenty or thirty gallon tank would probably be a good size for beginners. Because it’s a decent amount of water and it’s also big enough you can experiment with different types of fish. There’s a lot of fish that can live in a twenty or thirty gallon tank.

Whereas if you have a five or a ten gallon tank you’re very limited as to what you can actually put in the tank. When placing your tank in your home you want to make sure to place it away from direct sunlight. So you don’t want your tank to be right by a window. Having direct sunlight on your tank can cause you to have a lot of algae problems which you don’t want to have. The next thing is choosing your heater for your tank. I recommend the Aqueon underwater heaters that are adjustable. The Aqueon heaters just tend to be the best in my opinion. They make heaters that are adjustable and they also make heaters that are preset.

Best aquarium heaters

I do not recommend preset heaters because they tend to malfunction and if you have a preset heater in your tank and for whatever reason it’s not heating your tank to the proper temperature there’s no way of adjusting it because it’s preset. Whereas if you have an adjustable heater and you are checking your tank temperature and you realize that you need it to be a little higher or a little lower then you can at least adjust it. Which is really good. So I recommend getting an adjustable heater and again Aqueon is a very good brand. I want to mention really quick this video is not sponsored at all. I’m genuine, just giving you the different brands that I recommend and what I personally use.

I’m not being paid to say any of this.

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You want a heater and then obviously you want a thermometer. I tend to really like the probe thermometers because you can like stick a little probe in the corner of the tank and then it will have a digital display that you can suction cup to the side of the tank. It’ll just help you keep track of the temperature of the water very easily.

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Choosing an aquarium filter

Now we’re gonna get into the more complicated part of this which is choosing your filter. Now in fish tanks there are three different types of filters that are very common. That being hang on back filters, canister filters and sumps. Sumps are most often used in saltwater tanks. There are people who make freshwater sumps stuff. There are people who use fresh water sumps. For the sake of this video and being for beginners I’m just going to talk about hang on back filters and canister filters. This is because those are the most common types of filters used for freshwater tanks.

Now as far as hang on back filters I recommend the Aquaclear ones or the Fluval ones. Those are just my favorite hang on back filters. Hang on back filters are obviously filters that hang on the back of the fish tank. I don’t have one on this tank but I have one on my crayfishes 10 gallon tank. These filters tend to just be smaller and in my opinion they aren’t as powerful as canister filters. I personally would only use a hang on back filter if you have a maybe twenty maybe thirty gallon or smaller tank. Anything bigger than that I would recommend getting a canister filter.

Fluval and Sunsun

Now a canister filter is a filter that kind of looks like a small garbage can. You can kind of hide it away under your fish tank in the cabinet or whatever. It’s nice because it isn’t visible and as far as canister filters go I would recommend either getting a Fluval. Fluval make really nice canister filters. They just are a little bit more pricey. Or I would recommend the brand Sunsun which is kind of like an off-brand canister filter that you have to buy online. They sell Sunsun canister filters on eBay and on Amazon. What’s nice about Sunsun is they make really powerful canister filters for a fraction of the price of Fluval filters.

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Fluval or Sunsun?

Now if you don’t like ordering stuff online like some people then you can just go to Pet Smart or Petco and get a Fluval filter and you’re good to go. But Sunsun just makes more powerful filters for the price. Now when choosing a filter on the box of the filter that you’re getting it’ll usually say this filter is good for fish tanks from let’s say 20 gallons to 40 gallons or 60 gallons to 80 gallons. You don’t want to follow what the label says you should use. because usually they under compensate and they’ll say that a filter is good for a 30 gallon tank when really it’s only good for a 10 gallon tank.

So when you’re looking at different filters what you actually want to look at is the GPH which stands for gallons per hour. And what this means is this is the amount of gallons that the filter will filter in an hour. Basically you want whatever filter you use to filter all of the water in your freshwater aquarium four times over. So let’s say you have a 40 gallon aquarium. You want to do 40 times four which is 160 so you would want to get a filter that says it filters at least 160 gallons per hour.

Filter GPH rates

When buying a filter it’s better to get a filter that’s super powerful than get one that isn’t powerful enough. For my 60 gallon freshwater tank I use the Sunsun HW 404 B. This is a filter that filters five hundred and twenty-five gallons per hour. So this is a sixty gallon tank. That basically means that my filter will filter all of the water in my tank nine times every hour. This is a lot more than you necessarily need it to do. But what’s nice about having a more powerful filter is the more powerful your filter is the more heavily stocked you can keep your fish too.

If you have a filter that isn’t strong enough you’re not going to be able to put a lot of fish in there. This because your filter won’t be able to deal with all the bio load that is produced by the fish. What’s also nice about my canister filter is it is a five stage filter. Meaning there are five baskets in there to put your filtration media. And another thing that’s nice about canister filters is they’re very customizable as far as you can put whatever filter media you want in there. And you can put it in whatever order you want.

Canister filters

So like my canister filter the way it works is the water goes down the bottom of the filter and then it goes up and then out so whatever filter media I have on the bottom the water will go through first and then whatever’s on top it’ll go through last. Hang on back filters just don’t have as much room for filter medias. They’re not as customizable.

Now the only con with canister filters versus hang on back filters is canister filters do require a bit more maintenance. They’re more work to clean out because you have to turn off the filter and empty out the water and clean out all the media and kind of rinse out the whole inside of the filter really well. You’re supposed to do this about once a month. So that can be a lot of work but if you have a bigger aquarium like I do then it in my opinion is very necessary to have a canister filter and to be keeping up with. Because you obviously don’t want any ammonia or nitrites or nitrates building up in your tank too much.

Surface agitation

And what’s also very important about the filter you use is the output of the filter will cause surface agitation. This basically means the water on the surface of your tank is moving and like this has this tube back here that shoots water kind of out and then down so then it’s causing a lot of surface agitation. And it adds oxygen to the water so your fish can breathe properly.

If there isn’t enough surface agitation in your tank then that is when you would want to add an air stone with the air pump which is a bubbler which I also have back here. That just adds extra oxygen or you could just add it for the aesthetic of your tank. You don’t necessarily need it for the oxygen if you have enough this agitation from your filter.

Filter media types

The filter is probably the most complicated part of this whole process and basically there are three different types of filter media. Filter media is what you put in your filter that actually filters the water. Now the three different types of filter media are mechanical, chemical and biological. The mechanical filtration is the filtration that kind of acts as a strainer and helps catch debris. They’re floating in the water and you should remove them from your tank.

A chemical filtration helps remove different toxins from the water and the biological filtration is where your beneficial bacteria lives and that helps transfer ammonia into nitrite and then into nitrate so like in my canister filter I have my mechanical filtration at the bottom, I have my chemical filtration kind of in the middle and then I have my biological filtration on the top. That’s usually the order people recommend having your filter so that the water first goes through mechanical and then chemical and then biological.

Mechanical filtration

For mechanical filter that’s where they have different filter sponges and different things that have like a rough texture. You can also use like filter floss. Basically just a material that you use that the water runs through and it catches all the debris for chemical filtration.

It’s most common to use carbon. So they make carbon that is made for your aquarium that you put in the filter and that just helps catch any toxins or anything like that that’s in the water. The only thing with chemical filtration is if you’re treating your fish for some kind of sickness like ich or something like that and you have to put medication in the water. You want to take the carbon out because the carbon will actually filter the medication out of the water.

Biological filtration

Then there’s the biological filtration which is very very important. Now for biological filtration they make different things. Some people use those really rough scrubby things that you wash dishes with. They also sell bioballs and from what I’ve heard bio balls don’t do as well in canister filters. They’re usually used in sumps. In canister filters it just doesn’t have enough surface area. But I like to use for my biological filter media is the Fluval bio max bio rings. These are little really rough textured things that you put in the filter and it has a lot of surface area for your beneficial bacteria to grow and the beneficial bacteria is very important because it transfers ammonia into nitrite and to nitrate.

Ammonia

Ammonia is produced from any excess food in your tank as well as any fish that may have died in your tank or fish produce ammonia from their poop you don’t want your ammonia to build up in your fish tank because ammonia is very toxic for your fish. So the way you get rid of ammonia is by having some kind of biological filter media for beneficial bacteria to grow. And another very important thing when starting your fish tank is cycling.

Your tank. Cycling your tank is a process that you have to go through before actually adding fish to your tank. A lot of people make the mistake of not doing this because they either just don’t know because a lot of times at the pet store they just don’t tell you to do this for some reason and also people are impatient so they don’t want to cycle their tank. Now cycling your tank is a process that I’ll talk about in a few minutes. Because I’m trying to go in the order of what you would do when setting up your tank.

Choose a substrate

So now that you have your thermometer, your heater, and your filter and your tank you want to choose a substrate to use in your tank. Now for a substrate you can use pretty much anything from marbles, stones, gravel sand and they also make like prepackaged substrate for aquariums that works fine. When choosing a substrate something you want to keep in mind is if you want to have a planted tank.

Or if you just want to have a tank that has fake plants in it. If you have a tank with fake plants and it doesn’t really matter what you use as your substrate but if you’re gonna have a planted tank with live plants and I would recommend either going with sand or going with a prepared substrate for your fish tank.

There are substrates they make that are good for planted tanks. They have nutrients and stuff in them. As for sand I know you can use play sand and what I use is black diamond blasting sand. The only thing if you use sand is you want to make sure it’s a sand that is aquarium safe. So like I said I know the black diamond blasting sand is safe for aquariums and so is place and you just need to rinse them very well before adding them to your tank so that it doesn’t make the water all cloudy. But what’s nice about a lot of the already packaged aquarium sands is that they are already pre rinsed.

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Adding water

So once you add your substrate to your tank you then need to add water. Now if you’re using tap water you do have to use a tap water conditioner because tap water has a lot of things in it that are bad for fish. Specific tap water conditioner I use is the Prime tap water conditioner. This is by Seachem. Once again I’ll link this down below. Seachem products are in my opinion the best. They make a ton of really good aquarium additives and what’s nice about this is you only have to use one capful for every 50 gallons of water. This lasts a long time. This is a very important step.
(Advertisement) Seachem products including Prime conditioner

You don’t want to not condition your water. Because that’s how you are gonna kill all your fish if you just add tap water and you don’t condition it.

Then once you add your water you obviously want to turn on your heater and make sure you set it so that your water is around 78 degrees. Again this is for a tropical freshwater aquarium. If you’re gonna have goldfish or something that lives in cold water you don’t need a heater but you’re still going to want to add a thermometer so that you can keep track of the temperature to make sure you don’t have to cool the water and then you’re gonna want to choose lighting for your tank and again this will depend on whether you want a planted tank or a tank that isn’t planted.

Aquarium lighting

If you have a tank that is not planted with live plants then it really doesn’t matter what lighting you use. Do whatever you want, but if you’re gonna have a planted tank then you want to make sure you have a light that is made to support plant life because plants need a specific spectrum of lighting. A couple of good brands lights to get for your aquarium if you’re gonna do a planted aquarium I know are the night crew and the beams work back here. What I have is the beams work light and then you obviously want to add decorations. So you’re gonna want to add live plants and if you do add live plants to your tank you want to make sure to add nutrients to the soil.

If you didn’t get something that’s prepared for live plants there are little tablets that you can put into the sand that add nutrients to it for the plants and what you can also add to the water our add lives for plants that adds nutrition to the water. What I use for my tank is Flourish by Seachem and then obviously you can add rocks to your tank . You can add different decorations.

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Add driftwood/

Another thing that I really love to add to fish tanks is driftwood. Like how natural the driftwood looks. It really looks like you’re just looking into the bottom of a lake. If you’re going to add driftwood to your aquarium you want to boil it in a pot of hot water because boiling it will help sterilize it and get anything that could be living in the driftwood out of it and also driftwood makes your water turn brown. These things in driftwood called tannins that leach out into the water. It’s almost like if you put a teabag into the water. It leaches out this color. The same thing happens with wood.

So by boiling the wood you’re not only sterilizing the wood but you’re helping leach out all the tannins. You can just keep boiling the wood until the water comes out clear and then you don’t have to worry about your tank water turning brown. Another useful thing to know about adding driftwood to your tank is if you don’t boil the driftwood all the way and get all the tannins out if the tannins leach out into your water then it’s not necessarily harmful; it’ll just look gross. But what the tannins do is it lowers the pH of the water. So if your pH is too high for whatever reason in your fish tank it can actually be useful to add driftwood so that it lowers the pH of the water.

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Lowering pH

So that’s just a fun little trick if you need to lower your pH for some reason. And now we’re gonna get to the fun part which is cycling your tank. This is the most important thing you have to do if you want your fish to live. Cycling this tank is basically the process of building up beneficial bacteria in your filter. Process all of the ammonia and nitrite and make it so that your water isn’t toxic and it helps remove waste from the water.

Cycling the tank

So to do this like I said before. You need to make sure you have biological filter media in your filter because this is where all of the beneficial bacteria is going to live and basically once you fill up your tank with water and you have the temperature set and you’re all good to go and you haven’t added fish. Yeah there are a few different ways to cycle your tank. The most basic way to do it but also the most time consuming is to pretend you have fish in your tank and add a little bit of food to your tank.

However much food you would normally feed the fish in the tank of your size you want to pretend the fish are there and just be the imaginary fish. Every day the food will just sink to the bottom of your tank. It’s gonna look probably kind of gross but it’s fine. The food will start to decompose in your tank and release ammonia into the water. This is going to help to start build-up beneficial bacteria into your tank. Then over time that ammonia will transfer to nitrites and then those nitrites will transfer into nitrates.

API test kit

Now to keep track of all of this you need to have a testing system to test the water in your tank. I like to use the API test kit. This is what the API test kit looks like. It comes with little test tubes and then different droplets. Basically you fill up the water and the test tube to the line and then you add however many drops for whatever you’re testing for. This tests for ammonia nitrite nitrate and the pH and there’s a color chart that looks like this. It will tell you how much ammonia is in your tank, how much nitrate, how much nitrate and what your pH is.

When you’re cycling your tank you basically want to test the water every day. You can see when ammonia starts to spike in your tank and then you’ll see it when the ammonia goes down and your nitrite goes up and then you’ll see when the nitrite goes down and your nitrate goes up and as soon as you have zero ammonia, zero nitrite and just a little bit of nitrate that’s when you know the cycling process is done.

Test water weekly

You’ll have to continue testing your water. I probably test my water about once a week because this tank is very well established and I don’t have any spikes of ammonia or anything happening. So you’re gonna cycle the tank by adding food to the tank every day. Some people will add a couple fish to their tank to help produce more waste and cycle the tank which I personally wouldn’t recommend doing. People add different hearty fish.

There’s a very good chance you’ll end up killing any fish if you put them in here while the tank is cycling. So the cycling process can take anywhere from a month to two months. This is why a lot of people just skip it because they don’t want to wait a month or two months to start adding fish to their tank. But it is very necessary,. Now if you’re like me and you’re very impatient there are a couple ways to speed up the cycling process of your tank.

Beneficial bacteria

The first way to speed up the process is to add the beneficial bacteria straight into your tank like API QuickStart which I really like and also Marineland makes these pouches of beneficial bacteria and these do work. The only thing is you can’t just add API QuickStart and then add fish right away. it just makes it so it cycles your tank faster so it’ll go through the whole cycling process and maybe a couple weeks instead of a couple months.

The other thing you can do to speed up the cycling process is if you have another fish tank or if you know someone who has a fish tank with biological media that’s already established.

You can take some biological media from a different fish tank and add it to your biological media so you’re basically taking biological media that already has beneficial bacteria in it and you’re just adding it to your fish tank so that you already basically have the beneficial bacteria and even if you do this I would still probably wait one or two weeks before actually adding fish to your tank just to make sure that you’re not gonna have any ammonia spikes in your tank.

Start adding fish

So basically whenever I start a fish tank I have a crap-ton of biological media in this fish tank so I’ll take a few pieces of it and I’ll add it to a new fish tank if I want to start a new fish tank. Now once your tank is cycled you can’t just add 20 fish to your tank you still need to only add a couple fish at The tank will be way too large for the amount of beneficial bacteria you actually have. So you want to gradually over the course of several months add fish to your tank.

So you might want to add like a one or two fish to start. Now wait a week and then maybe you can add one or two more fish. Then just kind of add fish every two or three weeks and it’ll just help cycle your tank a lot more evenly than if you add a whole bunch of fish and then you’re gonna have an ammonia spike and they’re all gonna die.

Types of fish

You might think that you can just add whatever fish you want to your fish tank that that is not true. You kind of have to make a decision if you want to have a fish tank full of aggressive fish or a fish tank full of friendly fish. There are some cases where you can probably mix the two but for the most part if you’re gonna have aggressive fish you only want to have aggressive fish because then the aggression will be evenly distributed throughout the tank. An example, our cichlid cichlids usually can only be kept in a cichlid only tank because cichlids are extremely aggressive and territorial and even amongst pretty friendly fish there are some fish that just don’t get along well with other fish.

This is where it comes in helpful to do your research online and kind of figure out what fish you want to add to your tank and then you can go on fish forums and stuff where people talk about their experiences with keeping certain types of fish together so you can kind of get a feel for if they will get along. There’s a really good website that I like to use called liveaquaria.com and this is a website where you can actually purchase fish and get them sent to your house and it’s a really good service.

Beware overstocking

I bought fish from them before but what’s really nice about this website is you can actually scroll through a whole bunch of different types of fish and it’ll tell you the minimum tank size requirement and what temperature they need, how easy they are to care for, what they need, what they eat.

Another thing to keep in mind is you don’t want to add too many fish to your tanks. You might be wondering how many fish can I add to my tank.

The general rule of thumb that I’ve seen but I don’t know how accurate this actually is, but it’ll just give you a general idea, and that is for every gallon of water you can have one to two inches of fish. Now this will vary depending on how strong your filtration system is but that’s just kind of a general rule of thumb. You’ll kind of know when you’ve reached your limit because like I said you should only be adding fish to your tank gradually and you also need to be testing your water for ammonia and nitrite and nitrate.

More fish equals stronger aquarium filter

But you don’t want to get to the point where you’re having ammonia spikes in the tank at all so it’s better to stay on the lower side of fish than to have way too many. The more fish you have the stronger filter you need and also the more water changes you need and also when you’re picking out a fish you want to make sure you look very closely at the fish to make sure they aren’t sick so you don’t want to get a fish that has like fin rot or tail rot or Ich or any type of fungus because if you have anything wrong with them and you put them in your fish tank then it’s gonna spread the issue to all your other fish and it’s gonna be a total disaster and you don’t want to deal with that.

So make sure you inspect your fish when you are purchasing it to make sure it’s healthy and another very important thing when getting new fish and this is optional but I would highly recommend doing this and that is to quarantine your fish. What that basically means is you need to set up a separate fish tank aside from your main display tank that’s maybe about 10 15 gallons running and cycled and you just want to have this empty tank that you can put new fish and before you add them to your stocked display tank to kind of keep them in this quarantine tank until you know they’re healthy.

Quarantine tanks

Usually you want to keep them in the quarantine tank for I would say at least a couple weeks just to make sure that they’re healthy and no problems develop and then you can put them in your main tank and another good thing about having a quarantine tank is if you notice a fish in your display tank starting to develop an issue like ich or something then you take it out of your tank and put it in the quarantine tank to treat it.

Cleaning and maintenance

Last but not least is cleaning your fish tank and maintenance on your fish tank. So if you have a heavily stocked tank then it is recommended to do 15 to 20 percent water changes every week but if you have a tank that is just kind of normally stocked and you don’t have a whole bunch of fish in there then you could get away with probably doing about a 20 or 25 percent water change every month. But usually it’s recommended to do more like a 10 percent water change every week just so you’re constantly taking out a little bit of water and adding some fresh water.

This will mainly help to get rid of the nitrates in the tank because nitrates aren’t necessarily toxic for your fish in small quantities but you don’t want a whole bunch of it building up in your tank and this is where a siphon comes into good use. I have a siphon which I’ll link down below.

Aquarium siphons

A ton of you guys asked me where I got it because I posted a video of me cleaning this tank with a siphon. What’s nice about my siphon is it hooks up to the sink. So it’ll suck up the water in your tank. Therefore you don’t have to deal with carrying buckets back and forth and you can stick the siphon in the gravel and it’ll suck up all the dirt and stuff that’s in the sand or gravel of your tank. Then you can turn the knob on the siphon so that it’ll actually pour water into your tank through the siphon from the sink and then you can fill up the tank the rest of the way. Again without buckets and add the water conditioner to your tank as well.

(Advertisement) Aquarium siphons on Amazon

And also like I said you have to clean your filter about once a month. If you have a hang on back filter it’s a lot easier to clean out. If you have a canister filter you need to clean out all the filter media. Do not clean the biological filter media because that’s where all your beneficial bacteria is living. And you don’t want to clean that because then you’re gonna end up killing all the beneficial bacteria. Alright so I think I’ve gone over everything that there is to go over.

Conclusion

I know this was a ton of information and it can get very overwhelming. If you have any extra information that I didn’t include in this video then please let us know down in the comments below. If you have any questions let us know in the comments below. Me or someone else who sees your comment can help answer any questions you have. Also I would recommend going to a local aquarium shop and asking them questions as well because people who work at those places usually have a ton of experience and you can also go on different forums online where a lot of questions have already been answered.