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Home Freshwater Aquarium Maintenance

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Home Freshwater Aquarium Maintenance

Home Freshwater Aquarium Maintenance, is very important to keeping your aquarium fish healthy. I looked all over the Internet to read about establishing an aquarium after my wife gave me a 75 gallon aquarium. I quickly realized that a lot of articles contradicted themselves. What I needed was advice from established authorities, rather than from unknowns on the Internet, so I bought several books from established authors to get my advice. I used this book to understand setup and maintenance of my aquarium HomeFreshwater Aquarium Maintenance.

I learned a lot from this book. To read what I learned read on, I have put a video on this site on how I do maintenance on my aquarium showing my lovely wife performing the actual work.

Cleaning Your Aquarium

You need to change out 10% of your water in your aquarium every week. I use a vacuum pump that removes the water and at the same time removes the debris at the bottom of the tank. This keeps the water clean and I do not have to completely drain the tank to clean it. Plus it only takes me about 45 minutes a week to perform this maintenance.
I have a video on this site that show you how to perform this maintenance. The important thing is to ensure the water you put back i the aquarium is free of chemicals and is about the same temperature of the water in the tank.

I have written a article on how I setup my 75 gallon tank at this link Aquarium Tank Set-Up.

If you want to learn more about establishing and maintaining an aquarium you can receive a lot of information at Freshwater Aquarium Resource Book.

Also see the results of my efforts at the video on this page plus the video on how I perform my weekly maintenance.

More information on cleaning your aquarium at How Deeply to Clean an Aquarium

Feeding Your Fish

If you look on the Internet on how to feed your freshwater fish it can be very confusing. There is lot of different methods provided some say feed only enough that they can consume in three minutes or even in 30 seconds. With all the different times given I go by the guideline that you should not allow to much to sink to the bottom of the aquarium.

But you do want to allow some fish food to get to the bottom especially if you have bottom feeding fish like I do. My Plecostomus are algae eaters but they do like some fish meal from time to time. I also provide some algae tablets to keep my bottom feeders fully content.

Besides the Plecostomus, I also have some cat fish that are bottom feeders also. These bottom feeders do a good job at keeping my aquarium free of algae.

A good book on caring for and feeding your fish is Tropical Fish Secrets

Cleaning My Fish Aquarium