This week’s post is inspired by
@Greggz ’s Saturday Morning Maintenance post from last week.
It all starts with water. I’m using mostly DI water mixed with a little bit of tap water to maintain SOME presence of chloride, sodium, and the traces that are there. It takes several hours on Friday night to generate DI for the change.
I run a heater and powerhead in the can overnight to warm it and keep it circulating. Over the last several months I’ve been changing 33% of my system volume weekly. I remineralize using a spreadsheet I put together, and a pile of dry chemicals from various sources. Along with the remineralization of the water, I include all of the macros for the week -- it's all in the water change, nothing else added through the rest of the week. The rest is fish food. Micros I had been adding once per week also, injecting into the root balls of each stand of plants, but after a few months of that, it doesn't seem to be a particular benefit. I'm going back to dosing micros three times a week, but very lightly overall.
First I pull and trim whatever is getting too tall. I rotate through trimming several species of plant each week to keep it easy. Vacuum out the substrate where I’ve pulled things up, just to keep things clean. Most plants I pull and cut away the bottoms, replant the tops. This week's cutting is pretty light, just cutting glandulosa and ludwigia palustris red. Glandulosa has been doing very well the last several weeks.
Next I scrape algae off the glass if needed, and move on to cleaning the sump, trading out the filter sock and floss pads. Vacuum out any gathered particulate from the sump. A couple times a year I remove the main return and reactor pumps, disassemble them & clean them out.
I really like filter socks. They work so well for mechanical filtration, and a simple pressure wash with a hose gets them clean again.
Also, filter socks help save any shrimp that go through the overflow — that’s 42 in the bucket this week!
I use a homemade drain system made from 1” PVC for draining and refill. It has a ball valve and hose adapter at the bottom. I hook the backyard hose to it to drain the tank. The tank is acrylic — when I had it made, I had them drill the euro-bracing at the corners for 1” PVC, for this fixture and for my filter return plumbing. The inner section of pipe can be changed out for larger or smaller water changes. Just drain it until it stops.
I have a pump and potable water hose just used for refilling from the plastic trash can. The pump is identical to my main return pump — If the main pump goes out, I have a replacement immediately available.
That's about it -- between 1-3 hours on a Saturday morning, depending on how much I'm trimming and how much I stop to thoughtfully scratch my beard.