Keeping your tanks glass clean is easily the top maintenance task for any aquarium. Keeping clean glass lets you see your fish and corals actual color, and also helps reflect light back into the tank at different angles, reducing shadowing. It is common for soft algae to grow on the glass that can be removed with a typical cleaning pad, but there are times that tougher calcium based algae, like coralline algae, can build up and is a lot more stubborn to remove. For more difficult algae types we like to use a metal blade scraper for glass aquariums and plastic blade cleaners for acrylic tanks. One of our favorite magnetic algae scrapers is the Flipper cleaner. They come in many different sizes, and a majority of them include plastic and metal blades depending on your tank material. Fipper cleaners have two working sides for the in-tank half of the scraper. The side with the felt pad works ideal for soft algae and film algae, where the other half with the scraping blade can be used for calcium deposits and tougher algae. The biggest benefit of the Flipper Magnetic Cleaner is that it can be "flipped" without having to remove it from the tank. Just slide the cleaner over to the corner of your tank, not too close to the bottom or top, and then with the outer portion go across the corner while giving it a 180-degree twist to reverse the magnet polarity. It may take a few tries, but once you find the right technique the Flipper Algae Cleaner is a reliable glass scraper that no tank should go without!