Rules for Keeping a Fish Tank while Being Lazy

Mrs Vache Folle wants to clean the fish tank today. It's long overdue, and we need the fish poop water for the house plants. We have had an aquarium, or two, for over twenty years straight now, and I don't reckon that our home would be complete without one. Because we are busy and lazy, we have got aquarium maintenance down to a science. We spend an hour every three weeks or so changing about a third of the water and removing algae. Otherwise, Mrs VF just adds water to replace what has evaporated.

How do we manage to keep a healthy fish tank with so little effort? We follow a few simple rules:

Have a filtration system that is more powerful than necessary for your tank. Have redundant filtration if you like. Just filter the bejeezus out of the water.

Keep real live plants. They put oxygen in the water and use up excess fish crap. They compete with the algae. They look nice and are fun to have.

Let snails abound. They clean off the surfaces.

Keep bottom feeders.

Keep only a quarter as many fish as your tank is capable of supporting. We like to keep a single type to avoid genocidal conflict. Now we have all tetras (except for the catfish). We once had a nice gourami tank. Our fish actually reproduce in the tank, and we rarely have to buy replacement fish.

Don't worry about algae on the ornaments and caves and such like. Tell yourself it looks natural. Don't put so much of that crap in the tank to begin with.

Don't overfeed the fish. As a matter of fact, forget to feed them sometimes and make them clean up the red flakes that they don't seem to like very much.

Follow these guidelines, and you too can have a pretty much self maintaining aquatic habitat in your house.