Find fish stores offering professional aquarium cleaning and maintenance services across the United States. Browse 237 stores in 26 states with ratings, hours, and directions.
A 200-gallon reef does not care that you had a long week at work. Alkalinity still drifted from 8.5 to 7.2 dKH, the protein skimmer cup overflowed onto the stand, and the ATO reservoir ran dry while you were on a business trip. Professional aquarium maintenance exists because keeping water chemistry stable across a 50-, 100-, or 300-gallon system demands consistency that most hobbyists struggle to deliver week after week. The best maintenance techs are the ones who keep serious tanks of their own. They notice a Montipora receding before it is gone, they catch a heater stuck on before livestock cooks, and they bring the test kits, replacement parts, and dosing supplies that keep your system dialed in between visits.
A quality maintenance tech does not just show up, scrape glass, and leave. The visit starts with a full parameter check: ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, phosphate, alkalinity, calcium, and magnesium on a reef, or pH, KH, and nitrate on a planted freshwater system. They are using Hanna checkers or Salifert kits, not API strips. From there it is hands-on: siphoning detritus from the sandbed and sump baffles, cleaning the skimmer neck and pump impellers, replacing filter socks or floss, checking return pump flow rates, and topping off two-part dosing containers or adjusting a dosing pump schedule. Good techs photograph the tank each visit so they can spot slow changes, like a GSP colony creeping toward your Acropora or a BTA that moved six inches closer to the powerhead. They also test equipment: are your heaters holding temp within half a degree, is the ATO float switch moving freely, does the return pump sound different than last week? That last one has saved more tanks than any water test.
Small desktop nanos can usually survive on weekly hobbyist effort, but once a system crosses the 75-gallon mark (especially saltwater) the margin for error narrows and the labor scales up. A 150-gallon mixed reef running an SPS-dominant frag section needs stable alkalinity consumption tracked to the tenth of a dKH, calcium replenished at 20-40 ppm per day, and magnesium kept between 1350 and 1450 ppm. Miss a dosing pump malfunction for three days and you are looking at tissue necrosis across an entire colony. Large freshwater setups have their own demands: a 300-gallon cichlid tank with a Fluval FX6 canister needs media rinsed in old tank water every two weeks, substrate vacuumed in sections, and nitrate kept under 40 ppm to prevent hole-in-the-head disease in Oscars and other sensitive species. Professional maintenance catches problems in the boring-but-critical window before they become emergencies.
The single best question you can ask a prospective maintenance provider: what do you keep at home? A tech who runs a 120-gallon SPS reef and a 40-breeder planted tank brings intuition that no training manual provides. They know what a healthy tank smells like versus one trending toward a cyano outbreak. They can eyeball flow patterns and tell you that your MP40 needs to come up two inches. They recognize the early signs of Vibrio in a clownfish or columnaris in a gourami because they have fought those battles in their own living rooms. Compare that with a service that hires general laborers and hands them a laminated checklist. Those crews will change water and wipe glass, but they will not catch the subtle shift in a torch coral's tentacle inflation that signals alkalinity swinging too fast. Ask for references, check how many of their clients have been with them for over two years, and look at photos of tanks they maintain. Longevity in this business says everything.