Aquarium Maintenance – Too Much For One Day!

I think I’ve officially topped my record for total amount of aquarium maintenance performed in one day. That’s hard to do after having an aquarium running for several years! What all did I do today?

Algae scraping

I first started out by doing some detailed scraping of the glass with a plastic scraper to clear some of the algae areas that had been bugging me. My turbo snail clan has been tearing it up inside my tank, but there’s still a couple spots I gotta clean manually on the glass every now and again.

Vacuuming

After the glass cleaning I went straight into a good round of aquarium gravel vacuuming. I had blown detritus out of my live rocks yesterday and had the canister filter hooked up to clear the water overnight. Today I did a thorough vacuum job of the top half inch of substrate, clearing all kinds of good junk outta the tank.

And then the canister filter…

After the gravel vacuuming, everything was looking pretty good in the aquarium. I left it alone for a while. I went into the kitchen and started cleaning out the canister filter.

Once I had the canister filter all cleaned up, I put it into storage for the time being. I’m no longer going to run the canister full time since I’ve finally got enough live rock in the aquarium to negate the need for a constant canister filter.

And the skimmer…

From there I proceeded to take down my AquaC Remora protein skimmer and powerhead to clean up that thing. It was well due for a good cleaning! Any time I start to find my snails camping out on the water return area I know it’s about time to clean it.

I spent a good chunk of time thoroughly cleaning out the skimmer.

Clean up the lighting

Once it was clean I hooked all that back up and then got to work on cleaning up some salt creep on the top edges of the aquarium. I also wiped down my lighting canopy as good as I could. I gotta keep that thing clean, it was expensive!

RowaPhos swap

At that point, I figured I might as well keep going. I proceeded to swap media out of my phosphate reactor to get some fresh RowaPhos loaded up and in action. The phosphate battle in my aquarium is going really well and I think this round of RowaPhos is gonna take down my phosphate levels to where they finally need to be.

Salt creep!

Once I finally had that stuff complete, I couldn’t really find much else to do. Ah yes, I had forgotten about my glass tops for the aquarium. They had some salt creep going on and needed to be washed. I proceeded to wash those up quickly in the bath tub while my cats sat and looked on, confused as to what I was doing with glass panels in the bathroom.

After putting the cleaned up glass tops back on the aquarium and wiping the whole thing down, this freakin aquarium looks new again! Yeah! Now I’m good to go for a couple weeks until I gotta clean it up again.