How long does it take to do your tank's maintance?

Well, it doesn't take me long partially b/c I don't do WCs. I only do WC when I want to clean the sand and sump.


Luna

 

since my tank is in my man cave , lol , im around it alot. so i pick away at things all the time. so ive never got a long drawn out maintenance sched. it might take 2 hrs to do water tests , but thats because im watchin a game or something. so if i added it up that way , for my 90 and mantis tank id be around 30 hrs. .

 

Are you asking me or the wife?

 

I clean my skimmer every couple days, throw some 2 part in each day, and since I'm lazy, a water change every couple weeks. I spent maybe an hour a week on the tank total, hour and a half on water change weeks?

 

Maintenance??

 

Id say maybe between water changes and equipment maintenance... Feeding and glass cleaning, aoubt 10 hours a month maybe? Adding acclimation times in is a whole different story. LOL

 

I do a water change every two weeks (I try!) and it takes me about 30 minutes. If I do a full on cleaning it takes about an hour. Not too bad!

 

We usually spend about 10 minutes cleaning out the filter every other week, clean/scrape the glass very often so it never takes more then 10 minutes, feed them every other day which is maybe 5 minutes and we are constantly cleaning the outside of the tank due to fingerprints. Along with the typical top offs and weekly 5 gallon water changes we might spend 4 hours a month total. Recently though we have been battling green hair algae that is stubborn and all over the place so we have been doing alot of hand picking and scrubbing with a tooth brush which takes forever. Lastly we spend more time than any of the above flipping our turbo snails back over. 5 of those stupid things will keep you busy.

 

Like luna I tend to do a little each day, the longest is the day I do all my water parameters..... Stupid ammonia test takes 15 minutes by itself so about 20 minutes total that day
Water changes are easy, takes about 10 minutes to make up 10 gallons of saltwater to heat up and dissolve overnight and 10 minutes the next day to drain off 10 gallons and replace it.

 

Over the years due to maintenance I thought about getting out of the hobby many times...so with my current setup, I built in as much automation as possible to cut down on maintenance.

I usually clean the front glass while feeding the fish (mag-float) every few days. I change about 25g of water every 2-3 weeks and that usually take me 5-6 minutes (I timed it). I built the sump and my plumbing so that I don't have to shut-down the system during a water change, just shut-off/turn-on a couple of valves, flip on a few switches for the water change. Then my water change brute container is automatically refilled after a WC.