Would you like an easy way to track and manage your reef tank maintenance schedule? Let’s review our recommended reef tank maintenance schedule. We’ll break it down and give you a tool to manage the essential maintenance every reef tank needs.
Everyone enjoys watching their beautiful reef tank with bright fish and corals. However, with many things we value, you only get to enjoy the good AFTER the work has been put in. We often start to look at maintenance as a chore instead of part of the hobby – and we can wind up avoiding it altogether.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for an awesome reef tank to become an eyesore. This occurs when even the easiest and most routine of maintenance is ignored.
Maintenance tasks and their frequency can vary widely depending on the type and size of a reef tank. We will break down some basics and point out when additional or more frequent tasks may be required.
Daily Reef Tank Maintenance:
Let’s start with the day-to-day maintenance tasks. These can take only a few minutes a day once routine. They are easy but can mean a great deal to the success of your aquarium.
The most important thing you can do daily just takes a moment to observe your tank. The more familiar you are with your tank and livestock, the quicker you will notice when anything is off-kilter.
- Are your fish and invertebrates active? How about color, fins, eyes, any parasites?
- How about your corals? Are they open or do they look distressed? How is the color?
- Also, is the water clear? How about flow?
Also, you will likely feed daily or every other day, depending on your livestock and your nutrient export efficiency.
Lots of reefers feed every other day to limit the number of nutrients added to their tank. Not overfeeding your livestock is the first step to control their phosphate and nitrate levels.
Some fish are especially finicky and only eat live food. For these species, live fish food is a must—however, many marine fish benefit from a live food source.
A live copepod starter kit will seed your saltwater aquarium with microorganisms that eat waste and become fish food. You can also buy live phytoplankton to feed your marine coral and microorganisms.
Get fresh pods and phytoplankton shipped directly to your home. Your tank with thank you for it!
When feeding, are your tank inhabitants actively feeding? Keep a keen eye out for unusual behaviour!
Nano Reef Adviser
It is also a good time to clean the glass if it’s dirty. A quick lap or two with a magnetic cleaner around the glass can do wonders. The best magnetic cleaners – at least in my opinion – are those by Flipper.
They come with a large soft cleaning pad on one side for daily maintenance and a Flip over to a stainless steel blade on the opposite side to remove hard algae.
Their design allows it to flip the cleaner inside the tank simply by rotating the outer handle. You can keep your glass clean without ever reaching in the tank. The less you are reaching in the tank, the better for your water chemistry!
Flipper Standard 2-in-1 | Flipper Nano 2-in-1
Equipment checks could include the automatic top-off reservoir level, various carbon,
Check your tank temperature with your heater’s digital thermometer or your tank’s thermometer. Monitoring your heater can help make sure there are no surprises. It’s also a good idea to have a couple of thermometers to cross-check results due to calibration errors.
Take a glance at your ammonia badge if you use one. It’s a simple way to ballpark ammonia issues day to day without testing.
Weekly Reef Tank Maintenance:
Weekly tasks will likely include testing water parameters, water changes, and cleaning. One of the rewards for all this maintenance is a stable tank. A stable tank frequently takes less maintenance. This can allow you to push some of the weekly tasks to every other week.
A reef tank really is a glass box of water with money in it. I just made that up – I think I like it!
Kidding aside, the condition of the water in the reef tank directly affects how the tank looks and performs long term. The only way to verify the environment you are creating for your livestock is adequate – is by testing the water.
Stocking is critical regardless of the size and makeup of your specific tank. The amount of fish, invertebrates, and coral contained in your tank will directly affect the frequency of testing required.
Water Testing
Most reefers will be able to run their entire battery of water parameter tests weekly. These will likely include:
- Salinity
- Phosphate
- Nitrate
- Alkalinity
- pH
Tests that may be run every other week include:
- Ammonia (can be monthly or longer with established tanks or coinciding with the addition of future livestock)
- Nitrite (can be monthly or longer with established tanks or coinciding with the addition of future livestock)
- Iodine (testing mostly required if you are actually dosing iodine)
- Calcium (can be monthly with most tanks)
- Magnesium (can be monthly with most tanks)
The responsibility that we have to the animals we keep is to provide a well-suited environment for them to be happy and thrive. As hobbyists, we have had experiences (or will at some point) with our reefs that are inexplicable, which can leave us second-guessing the hobby altogether. However, whichever method of reef keeping you use, we can all agree that keeping our home reef water parameters stable is key to success.
I recommend the Reef Professional Kit from Hanna to help you keep your water quality in check, monitoring your reef`s Alkalinity (dKH), Calcium, Phosphorus (ULR phosphate), and pH.
The Hanna Checkers remove subjective results and guesswork by taking away the color matching by eye test results. This allows us to get more accurate readings.
Just like other maintenance tasks you’ve scheduled, the testing frequency will vary between tanks. A tank stocked with soft corals can easily be sustained with this schedule. A tank full of SPS coral might need to test major elements like alkalinity, calcium, and magnesium much more frequently!
Also, a tank going through issues such as algae outbreaks, cyanobacteria, diatoms, and other uglies will likely need to test more frequently. Testing helps the aquarist to correct the imbalances that have likely led to the issues.
Running tests consistently will alert you to changes. Changes might indicate more frequent testing is required to maintain the target parameters. Test your parameters with the gold standard testing kits.
Water Changes: the lifeblood of the reef tank schedule.
Water changes are widely debated as to how much, how often, or even if they are needed at all! Generally speaking, even with programs like the Triton method, water changes are often required to make minor adjustments to water chemistry. For the vast majority of us – water changes are a way of life and one of the surest ways to restore water parameters that are out of whack.
Water changes are normally a weekly scheduled event, with many reefers electing an ‘every other week’ water change schedule.
- Weekly water changes are typically in the 10-15% range
- Longer interval changes are normally 20% or more
You will get to learn your tank and its best maintenance rhythm by sticking to these maintenance routines. Once you run with a
For water changes, you will want to remove not only old water but also detritus and debris. This can be by blowing out your live rock and siphon-cleaning your tank bottom or sand bed.
Remove wastes during water changes
Using a turkey baster to blow debris off of rocks that can be siphoned away will help reduce wastes that become nutrients. This can help avoid high phosphate and nitrate readings. Removing the detritus is an important step in nutrient reduction.
Most reef tanks also have a separate sump that includes filtration systems, skimmers, reactors, and more. Cleaning debris from the bottom of the sump and changing or cleaning filter socks or filter floss is essential.
While you are in the sump, double-check plumbing, hose connections, and pumps to verify everything looks good to go.
Before mixing your new saltwater to replace what is removed, check the salinity of the tank and verify that it is in the range you desire. Mix your new saltwater to an adjusted level if changes in the display tank salinity are required. For example, if the tank salinity is high, you may want to mix your new water below the target salinity to help bring the overall tank salinity down to the desired level.
Unless you have a large room for storage, your limited tank size will likely require you to refill your automatic top-off reservoir and dosing chambers.
Monthly Reef Tank Maintenance:
Now for the less frequent but still important monthly tasks. These will likely include changing out filter media such as carbon and GFO from your reactors. You will be changing out media bags if you don’t use reactors.
Quarterly Reef Tank Maintenance:
Quarterly maintenance is more about avoiding big surprises. If you skip quarterly maintenance, you may find a little thing is suddenly a major issue.
If you are using any aquarium controllers with probes, you will want to calibrate those probes to help ensure accurate readings. Typical probes include temperature, ph, salinity, ORP.
- Pull and clean powerheads and return pumps to restore performance and to keep stuff from collecting in the pumps
- Clean and adjust protein skimmer
- Check and replace RO/DI filters and resin. Make sure you are controlling the water quality you are putting back in the tank.
Summary:
And there you go. We covered the types of maintenance required to get the most out of your reef tank. We also covered how to set up your reef tank maintenance schedule.
I know it sounds like a lot. However, if you create a routine and stick to it consistently, it is likely to take less time and effort compared to letting it go playing catch up. A regular reef maintenance schedule will have a big payoff! You will have a beautiful reef tank that you and your loved ones can enjoy every day.
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