I just had an experience where a carpet steam cleaner came in handy in a very unexpected way. I had a revelation of sorts, in regards to realizing the flexibility of this steam cleaner that I have for cleaning carpets.
A huge aquarium
I recently moved my 75 gallon saltwater aquarium from one apartment to another. I had to move, and moving this aquarium is not fun.
Part of moving an aquarium, of course, is draining the water.
Using a siphon
Well, I used a manual siphon to drain the first 50 gallons or so of water, and then I got down to that last little bit on the bottom, about 2 inches deep, of just gross looking water. And the siphon wasn’t cutting it anymore. I was kind of at a loss as to what I was going to do to get this aquarium water out of the bottom.
It’s not just a tank that you can “tip and drain” – you need to really picture what I was up against here. This thing is about 4 feet wide, 2 feet vertically deep and about a foot deep to the wall. It’s big.
Using the carpet steam cleaner
My friend, who happens to be a custodian, was helping me move this thing. As I was standing around trying to figure out how I was gonna suck the water out, he looks over at my carpet extractor and says “hey just use this thing, it’ll be like a shop vac”.
Great point!
My carpet cleaner had a hose attachment, and I was able to just stick the hose into the bottom of the aquarium, turn the extractor on and just let it suck the rest of the water out of the bottom.
The only thing I really ran into, in terms of negatives, was that my carpet cleaner waste tank only hold about a gallon of water, so I had to make a few trips to get the rest of the water out of the aquarium – which was about 5 gallons.
But the carpet steam cleaner made it easy.
Yeah! I never had thought of using the cleaner in that way, but it worked great and saved me a lot of grief when moving that aquarium.
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