Weekly Update #5 - 6 Tanks cleaned in under an hour!

August 13, 2019

So once again, I'll start with our customary it was a quiet one this week. But really it has! Next week we will be doing a bit more!

We currently have 6 tanks at Fully Cycled HQ (2 bedroom flat!), I'll attach some pictures at the bottom of this article but, these are:

Our 240L Axolotl tank with Mushu & Mulan
A 60L Dwarf Puffer tank which is currently housing 1 male and 4 female puffers (possibly some babies as well!)
A 30L Red Cherry Shrimp tank, which has tons of babies
A 120L Community tank which has 3 species of guppies, 2 Panda Garras, 3 Panda Corys, 4 Albino Corys and a Kuhli Loach
A 30L holding tank for our baby guppies (they breed like rabbits!) as well as a tank for breeding Ramshorn Snails
Another 90L Community tank which has 15 Neon Tetras, 6 Otocinclus, a Bulldog Pleco, a Siamese Fighting Fish (which grew up in a community tank and has so far caused us no problems) and a Columbian Tetra that snuck in the bag with the Neons!

You might think that's a lot of tanks for a 2 bedroom flat! Well to that I say yes, it is quite a few! But the maintenance for these tanks is not actually that much, we can do all of our tanks in about an hour, this includes a 50% water change and a gravel clean which we normally do at some point over the weekend. Obviously this can change, as we recently had a bit of an algae bloom in the 120L Community tank so we cleaned up some of the ornaments in the tank as well as did a 70% water change while adjusting the light cycle and adding some algae remover which so far has helped keep the algae at bay!

How do we do water changes so quickly do you ask? Well its actually really easy, we bought a pump which is meant to be used for water features in the garden, and hooked it up to a hose, so all we need to do is stick the pump in the tank and put the other end of the hose in the sink and turn it on, the pump itself has small enough holes that we don't have to worry about anything getting sucked up (except the shrimp tank which we do with a siphon!) this can drain half the water in our 240L tank in about 5 minutes which really makes our life easy. We also then pump in tap water which we treat with declorinator as we're filling up the tanks. If theres 2 things that make all of this 10x easier its the pump and a long hose! Even if you have just the one tank, if it takes more than 1 bucket to do a water change, I highly recommend buying one!

As promised, see our tanks below!

Mushu & Mulans 240L