Overcleaning Your Fish Tank

A couple of years ago I had a 55 gallon fish tank. I would clean the fish tank once a week and make sure that I cleaned every spec of debris on the fish tank. I would siphon all of the rock and then put everything back together. After cleaning the fish for about a couple of months this way, all of my fish started getting really sick. It turns out that my fish had ich and fin rot at the same time. After the fish healed and I continued on with cleaning the tank, my fish got sick again. The tank was completely spotless and I didn't understand how my fish could be getting sick so often. I thought I was doing everything right.

You will want to clean your fish tank but you do not want to over clean your fish tank. You will want to clean your fish tank once every 2 weeks. When you clean your fish tank you will want to leave a little bit of algae if you have any algae eaters that will clean up the glass. If they don't have algae to eat you will need to add bottom feeder fish food to the fish tank.

You will want to clean the fish tank once every 2 weeks and only siphon half of the rock. The first time that you clean the tank you will clean the right side of the rock. After 2 weeks, you can then siphon the other side of the rock. Do not clean all of the rock at one time. This will completely wipe out your beneficial bacteria colony which grows stronger the longer that you have your fish tank. The beneficial bacteria fights off potential diseases, which explains why my fish were getting so sick after I was cleaning the fish tank.

If you don't clean your fish tank your fish will get sick a lot. The same thing goes for over cleaning your fish tank as well. You will need to find a happy medium somewhere in the middle. If you clean half of the rock and do a 20% water change, once every 2 weeks, you will not have any problems. You will also need to remember to clean your filter system. You will want to change the filter cartridges but do not throw away or clean off the biowheel if you have them. They store the beneficial bacteria as well.

If you don't clean the tank enough, you will run into a lot of problems. Most people don't know that you will run into problems if you over clean the tank as well. Make sure that you only clean the tank a certain amount of times per month. Never clean all of the rock all at once.