The Clean Up

As you may have noticed from my last post that the tank I found was in really bad shape.  It had the worst Calcium Buildup (often called Limescale) that I have ever seen on an aquarium!  That is not to say that it is not an issue that plagues aquarists.   More than likely if you live on the plant earth, you have hard water in the tap.  In fact, even if your home has a water softener it does not guarantee that the water coming out is in fact soft.  In most cases the water softener is only attached to the HOT water which means your regular Cold water is just as hard as your neighbors water.  Anyways, I am not writing about all the details about what hard water is.  Instead I wanted to show you how I got rid of the scale on my tank!

Here is a picture just to remind you of what I was dealing with!

There are several things I used to clean the glass.  Keep in mind that obviously I don't have a full tank with fish in it so I could use some materials/chemicals that you may not want to put into your tank once it is full.  I have found that distilled white vinegar works very well for most scale issues so that is where I started.

Using a rough side of a sponge I worked at the scale with the vinegar and I made some good headway.  For the tougher scale I used a putty knife (generally ok as long as the knife is relatively new with no dents or imperfections on the blade) to scrape off the tougher stuff.  Many people choose to use a new razor blade to do the same thing.  As I said this is generally ok and "shouldn't" scratch the glass but is to be used with caution.  Never use this method for removing scale on acrylic tanks as they will scratch/cut/mutilate your tank!

I also had some decorative water fountain scale remover known as "Protec" around from a previous job that I used to work that I used to finish up the process.  Protec is good stuff normally added directly to the water in decorative water fountains to breakdown and/or prevent the scale buildup and it works pretty good though I don't think it is safe for fish so I don't recommend adding it to your aquarium.  A bottle of this costs about $15 though I got mine for less for being a dealer at the time.

Here is the finished product!  I would say it is about 95% at this point and I may do a little more before I start it up.  I filled it up with the hose outside to make sure that it holds water and I think it does just fine though I think I am going to do some work resealing it just to be sure.  I don't want 55 Gallons of water inside my house!  :-)