Do I ever need to clean out the whole aquarium?
Providing you follow instructions with regard to feeding, fish selection, location and maintenance you should never need to empty and clean the aquarium. If you do ever need to do this you should keep at least 1/3rd of the old water and clean the ceramic media in dirty water taken from the aquarium (never clean in tap water).Aquariums use filter bacteria to remove toxic fish waste: creating a biological filter in the ceramic media. These filter bacteria are not already present in new aquariums, they will start to multiply when they have a food supply = fish waste. This means that when a fish is first added there will be more fish waste than there are filter bacteria to remove it.
