I can't stress enough the importance of water changes in the aquarium hobby. Making this a weekly ritual in your tanks maintenance schedule will dramatically increase your chances for success. I would briefly like to explain the reasons and procedure I use when making these changes.
Just taking water out and replacing it has a minimal effect at best. The reason is that the detritus, uneaten food and fish waste will build up in your tanks substrate. Just changing the water may drop levels of ammonia and nitrite initially but they will soon come back. This problem can be solved by the use of a gravel syphon (like the one pictured above). There are many of these available or you can make your own. The point here is you must syphon the build up in your tanks gravel without removing the gravel itself. Doing so removes the waste build up that causes the ammonia to spike so quickly. This helps prevent your biological filters from being overworked.
By keeping up this regime of water changes allows your biological filters to safely process any trace amounts of ammonia. This helps not only the immediate health of your fish but their long term well being as well by keeping the fishes immune system well intact.
A weekly mechanical filtration and cleaning can be most effective in eliminating some of the causes of unexplainable death. What I mean by mechanical filtration and cleaning is the weekly water change and siphoning of debris. Many Aquarists use power filters particularly on tanks 30 gallons or more. As such, most of the free floating particulate matter in a closed system is trapped. Even though most of this matter is caught, some of it is pulled down into the gravel bed. This material (uneaten food, feces, dust etc.) collects in the gravel bed and in many cases, cannot be seen by the aquarist. Much of it is digested by the living bacteria in the gravel and rendered harmless food for algae (nitrate). However the continued buildup of this material over long periods can cause unforseen problems. This buildup is termed detritus and its removal is an important factor to the continuing stability of your aquarium.
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