Hello everyone, it's Pierre and welcome back!

This video is about cleaning and changing the water in my 20 gallon fish tank. This is a "growout" aquarium for 3 baby oscars and 2 severums. They measure about 23 inches each. I feed them a lot and keep the nitrates as low as possible so they grow quickly.

One way to do this is with big, huge, massive water changes. This video shows me changing 90% of the water. Despite what many people think, big water changes do not harm fish. In nature a big flood or rainstorm changes the water chemistry and temperature very quickly... imagine if fish couldn't adapt to this?

The tank is a standard 20 gallon aquarium. The oscars and severums are approximately 3 month old babies. I use a simple, big and ugly sponge filter. There is a pothos plant with its roots in the water as well as some duckweed. It has a heater but it really turns on very rarely since I keep the room itself at around 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

I don't really care much about how the tank looks since it's not on "display" it's just top grow out these fish until I can put them in an empty 150 gallon aquarium that I'll be setting up soon. I do care about the nitrates which accumulate fairly quickly despite the plants since I feed heavily.

I test the water weekly. Once the nitrates exceed 40 ppm, I perform a 90% water change. I use a DIY PVC pipe siphon with a squeeze bulb to drain the water down to the "fin level".

In case you were wondering how the fish do with this... well, check out the video!

Thanks for watching and happy fishkeeping! See you next time.