Tank and water maintenance is very important to your axolotls overall quality of life and their health as well. You should prepare yourself for weekly maintenance with an axolotl aside from daily feeding.
- Water Changes: You will want to check your parameters weekly to determine how much water will need to be changed to keep your ammonia from spiking. Evaporation will naturally occur, keep in mind that topping off your tank with freshwater is not the same as a water change. It is important to remove existing water to remove ammonia and nitrites otherwise it is still in there if you just top off. We typically do 20-50% water changes once a week, and add Seachem Prestine after the water change as directed on the bottle to re-add any bacteria you removed during the water change process. Also, always add Seachem prime to any new water that you put into the tank!
TIP: Investing in a Python water syphon will save your back and save you tons of time! My only caution to using this is to remove your axolotl when using it to avoid it getting accidentally sucked up in the syphon.
- Spot cleaning: We use a turkey baster daily to remove any uneaten food or waste left behind by your axolotl.
- Filter media: We do not recommend ‘cleaning’ your filter media regularly, this can remove the beneficial bacteria and cause the cycle to crash. What we do is shake and rinse the sponges or media in the water bucket during a water change to get some of the debris out or gently rinsing under cold tap water. If you are using a filter that has disposable media you may need to change that every so often. We have found that we can usually rinse it out a couple times before having to dispose of it. Do not use warm or hot water to rinse your filter media, this will kill any beneficial bacteria that may be in it. We typically do this as needed, depending on your filter and how much “gunk” gets collected in it.
- Décor & Glass: Algae builds up over time, we recommend a magnetic glass cleaner to clean the glass on the inside of your tank. They also sell hand held scrubbers as well. Décor may need to be removed and cleaned off occasionally to remove algae buildup. We typically clean glass weekly and décor once a month.
- Deep cleaning: You will know when your tank is in need of a “deep clean” meaning, removing more water, syphoning of sand etc. We prefer not to clean the filter media at the same time that we do a deep cleaning. The reason is, when we do a deep clean we are removing a lot of the beneficial bacteria, if you do the filter media at the same time it will remove anymore and could cause issues with the cycle. Instead we just wait and do them on different weeks.