How to clean a fish tank? 🫧🧽🧼

[Fishies4Ever]

I’m not really new but it is kind of a newbie question so if you want you can move it. How should I clean a fish tank? I am getting a 29 gallon tank that used to have really hard water in it and now I have soft so there is bad hard water deposits. How should I clean them off I know you can’t use soap but what about like vinegar or something like that? Thank you!

 

[Acorno]

Vinegar works. Just make sure you rinse it off before use.

 

[sharkweek178]

Salt and vinegar and rinse it really well.

 

[Magnum Man]

figured I'd add this, after you got a couple good replies ( agree with vinegar / vinegar salt... throw in a razor if it's a glass tank ( but not for acrylic use ))

when I was a kid, I used to have a 55 gallon with 3 red breasted piranhas, that I used to feed chunks of raw chicken liver ( we raised chickens, & no one seemed to want to eat the livers ) of course after feeding them, the water would get cloudy for a half day or so... one day my littlest brother walked in, & saw the cloudy water, & thought he would help me out by running to the kitchen & getting the dish soap... as you could guess I walked in an hour or so later & the air stones had formed a 2 foot high drift of bubbles flowing on to the floor... of course my 3 - 8 inch long piranhas were dead... no idea how much soap he squirted into the tank...

BTW, I have used soap before, but it requires a lot of rinsing, & it does not much in the way of helping remove hard water build up... the 1st 2 suggestions are likely the best you'll get, IMO...

 

[TwoTankAmin]

I am bolder than most. I have bought a few used tanks over the years and I use the same method for them all. I do this outdoors where possible. With small er tank I would use a bathtub.

Step one fill tank with water and add bleach. For a 29 I would use about 1.5 gals of bleach. Let it sit filled to almost overflowing for 20-20 minutes. The drain it and rinse it out well.

When it has hard water stains I use Muriatic acid. This is dangerous if you do not know what you are doing. It is much stronger than belach and you need much less. This acid will burn you for sure and needs to be handled carefully. I till the tank with water and them add the acid. It doesn't take much of this acid to do the job. But even diluted in the tank it can still sting hands arms. It there is a bit too much acid it will for sure be harmful to bare skin.

I let this sit in the tank about 15 minutes and then drain the tank. If there are more stubborn calcium spots I will mix a small amount of acid and water in a cup (not a paper one). I use a Q-tip to dab the acid solution directly onto the calcium. Then I use a single edge razor and the calcium usually comes off with ease. If not I will try again and make it wetter and wait a little longer before scraping.

While acid can be dangerous if one is not careful, vinegar smells awful. I also use my acid to lower the pH in one tank and, diluted, to test rocks.

If you are not 110% sure you can handle the acid, stick with the vinegar. You can still do the bleach part which is designed to kill anything that might be in the tank that can survive if not wet plus it also cleans.

 

[Uberhoust]

I still like typical chlorine bleach for cleaning aquariums. If I am tanking down a tank, I will clean it with a cloth with straight bleach added. You don't need much and it is very effective in dealing with any sort of pathogens you might typically encounter. When I used gravel as a substrate I would remove it from the tank and place it in 5 gallon buckets with a cup of bleach and water each to fill them to the point of just covering the gravel leaving them a day then rinsing the gravel. The bleach rinses easily but often people don't use gloves and bleach will remove fats out of your skin and this is what they end up trying to rinse away, which takes forever.
1. Empty tank
2. Wipe down with bleach soaked cloth
3. Let sit a few minutes
4. Rinse.
5. Check for bleach odor to ensure rinsing removed it al

As TwoTankAmin does, I will use muriatic acid to clean scale. I also use muriatic acid to test for carbonates in rocks.