Maintenance

Saturday is weekly maintenance day for my tank. The first thing I do is a water change/gravel vacuum. I give the sand a good once over with the vacuum to pick up uneaten food and fish poop. If I don't they'll decay and in the process make ammonia, a lot of it. Since the gravel vacuum is also a siphon I wind up sucking out about five gallons of water. Once the vacuuming is done I put my bucket low on the floor to suck the hardest it can and pull another five gallons of water out. All in all it takes about fifteen minutes.Once I've pulled out the ten gallons its time to put it back. The first two and a half gallons get the water conditioner for the full ten gallon change along with the pinch of buffering salts, the next three buckets just get salt. That takes about another fifteen minutes. After that I use a fork to stir up the sand to keep it from getting to compact and going anaerobic. Finally I rotate my filters, I pull out the cartridge on the right, move the one on the left into the slot on the right and put a fresh cartridge on the left. Since they've both been in the tank for two weeks now I'll remove the first one, in two weeks I'll yank the next one. If I keep up that schedule each cartridge will stay in the tank for a month with them on average being two weeks old.

All that takes about forty minutes to work through. Really it's not too bad.

For the aggravation I treat my fish too some frozen brine shrimp. Unfortunately being the first time I'd done this I put in WAY too much shrimp. I had to fish a lot of them out with my fish net. Next time I'm going to give them about a third of what I did. Given how much they had to eat they only got one small meal on Sunday.