What kind of maintenance do i need to do for a saltwater aquarium?

Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 12:09 am

Genevieve asked:

i am going to get a 55 gallon saltwater aquarium...with only live sand...what kind of daily maintenence...weekly and monthly maintence will i need to do? and also what equiptment will i need for everything

Response :

First of all, you'll need to cycle the tank for a month or two. Then you will need a canister filter or wet dry filter, heater, a protein skimmer, a UV sterilizer would be nice, and you'll need one or two powerheads because you want keep the water moving. You'll need to do biweekly water changes of about 25% of the water. You should test it regularly, and every month (every two water changes) clean out all the equipment inside and out. Except for the heater of course. There is no way you can have a tank with only sand. The fish need rocks to hide in or behind. If they have no cover, they'll be stressed out all the time, and they'll most likely fight all the time. If you're even thinking about corals, you need great lighting, like power compact lights, and rocks to put the corals buy antibiotics on so they're closer to the lights. You can use live rock or just regular aquarium decorative rocks, but you need something. A box of glass with water and sand is possibly the worst environment a bunch of fish could ever be in. Another thing is when you arrange the rocks, don't leave a bunch of room in the front, and then lean the rocks against the glass. This may sound stupid, but when the fish have room behind the rocks, they'll spend more time in front. It works like that because when fish know they have somewhere to hide in case something scares them, they spend more time in the open.

Tan N: You can't change your filter. You can change your filter media or filter pad, but thats not a good thing to be doing weekly. The filter media is where 80% of your nitrifying bacteria should be. If you change it every week, it will almost be like cycling your tank again. Amonia and Nitrites are the main danger, while nitrates are only really lethal to invertebrates like shrimp. Fish don't care unless it gets pretty high.