Why maintain your powerheads?

Powerheads will develop a build up of calcified crap and coraline. Although most reefers promote this growth in their aquarium, it's not a good thing to allow it to build up on your equiptment.

Why maintain your powerheads?

Simple really, all equiptment should be regulary maintained to ensure that it runs to it's optimum performance.

Powerheads will develop a build up of calcified crap and coraline. Although most reefers promote this growth in their aquarium,
it's not a good thing to allow it to build up on your equiptment.



The grills in the powerheads or pumps become blocked and the performance and life of the kit will suffer becasue of this.

Coraline is a hard calcified algae and can be extremely tough to remove from sufaces of your equiptment. Below is what you need to make the removal a lot easier.

What you need:

• A bucket or bowl
• Old tooth brush
• Bottle of vinegar

How to do it:

I used a 250ml bottle of vinegar (from any supermarket) and epmtied it into an old salt bucket.

I then filled the bucket with enough water so that the powerheads would be fully submerged. Break the powerheads down into their seperate parts making sure you completely understand how they fit back together.




** Cover over and leave to soak for 24 hours **


The next day, take your parts and use the old tooth brush to scrub them clean. The majority of the calcified coraline with have become very soft and fall away from the parts leaving it easy to scrub clean.

Once clean rinse the parts thouroughly to remove any traces of the vinegar and dry.



Assemble the parts back together



And install back into your aquarium.

Monitor how quickly the coraline builds up on your cleaned powerheads to gauge how regularly you clean them. I would suggest doing this full maintenance every 3 - 4 months.