How to clean gravel without taking out most of the water?

[camsoft]

I bought a syphon kit for cleaning the tank and doing water changes. It is basically a pipe with a long plastic tube on one end. You stick it in the tank and move it up and down vigorously to get it stared. There is a clip that holds the other end of the pipe in the bucket and it can also be used to restrict the flow.

But no matter how much I pinch the cable I take out too much water and can't make much progress on the gravel. If I want to clean one quarter of the tank I end up taking out about 25% of the water in the process.

If I pinch the cable to restrict the water they it does not have enough suction to suck up the detritus.

Are they techniques to this or better tools for cleaning gravel, what do you guys do?

 

[Azure Lord]

As far as i know, no. The general concept of a siphon is to create a difference in pressure and let gravity pull the water.

May I ask, why do you wanna save the water?

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[nataliedd]

I have a python syphon and clean half of the gravel at one side and then clean the other half of the gravel the next week and the next water change cos you don't have to clean gravel every w/c.

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[Britty]

This is how a simple passive siphon gravel clean is meant to work. You clean the gravel and do a water change at the same time. The gravel muck ends up in the bucket. Gets both jobs done in one go. This is what I do. If you're losing too much water then you are vaccing the gravel too slowly, or do half the gravel one week and the other half the next.

There are other siphons you can buy but these come with a small electric pump. They turbulence the gravel which cleans it, the water gets sucked through a filter which traps the muck and the open end goes back into the tank and circulates the filtered water without losing any. But I wouldn't bother. You need to do water changes anyway, so why not use this to gravel vac at the same time?

 

[camsoft]

This is how a simple passive siphon gravel clean is meant to work. You clean the gravel and do a water change at the same time. The gravel muck ends up in the bucket. Gets both jobs done in one go. This is what I do. If you're losing too much water then you are vaccing the gravel too slowly, or do half the gravel one week and the other half the next.

There are other siphons you can buy but these come with a small electric pump. They turbulence the gravel which cleans it, the water gets sucked through a filter which traps the muck and the open end goes back into the tank and circulates the filtered water without losing any. But I wouldn't bother. You need to do water changes anyway, so why not use this to gravel vac at the same time?

Well I've got a 70 litre tank and I've got a lot of plants so I had to move slowly so that I don't suck up any plants or fish. Maybe it just takes practice.

 

[jrc0528]

I have a heavily planted tank too, a 75G, and rather deep gravel. I've found the siphon vac nearly useless as it takes several seconds to clean each small patch of gravel to where no more detrius is flowing up out of it. I end up rarely cleaning the gravel as the plants are in the way anyways, I do it when I pull up the plants to thin them out.

I made the mother-of-all gravel vacs by mounting a powerhead 400 to the top end and running a flex hose from it to an old-school HOB filter (from the '70s). The old HOB is just a large container that hung from the lip of the tank and had a perforated bottom plate inside. You cut sponge / felt pads to fit this plate and it has a tube coming up through the center for a pump to mount. A second powerhead is mounted to this tube to sent the water back to the tank. I use a course and a fine sponge layer with fine polishing felt underneath that. I take my time to vacuum the substrate completely (meaning the water running up through it goes clear again) before moving on to the next section.

It usually takes about an hour per side when I do this, but part of that is pulling and splitting plants and re-planting afterwards. After I'm done with both sides I do a 30% water change.

 

[trennamw]

I bought a syphon kit for cleaning the tank and doing water changes. It is basically a pipe with a long plastic tube on one end. You stick it in the tank and move it up and down vigorously to get it stared. There is a clip that holds the other end of the pipe in the bucket and it can also be used to restrict the flow.



But no matter how much I pinch the cable I take out too much water and can't make much progress on the gravel. If I want to clean one quarter of the tank I end up taking out about 25% of the water in the process.



If I pinch the cable to restrict the water they it does not have enough suction to suck up the detritus.



Are they techniques to this or better tools for cleaning gravel, what do you guys do?

It's a very standard practice to change 50% of the water in your tank once a week. And most people don't do a full gravel vac every week ... Shouldn't need it if you're feeding your fish properly.

So ... Simply put. Don't try to keep water in your tank when you clean the gravel It isn't good for your fish to avoid changing the water.


Sent from my iPhone with three hands tied behind my back.

 

[Fishfur]

One thing you can try, if you like, is to use a small pump to suck out the dirty water and let the output run into a filter sock and back into the tank. That way, all the crud ends up in the sock, but the water goes back in the tank. Socks are usually for marine tanks, come in a couple of different size openings and meshes, like 100 micron, 200 micron, etc.

Or you can put the sock in the bucket and return some of the sucked up water to the tank, if you don't want to change that much. Aside from the extra water usage though, there's nothing wrong with changing more water each time you do it. Fish like clean water, so changing more at one time is not a bad thing.

 

[jrc0528]

If you do use a pump and filter for gravel/substrate cleaning (like me) remember that you'll still want to do a water change immediately after. I do 30-50% following a heavy cleaning.

NOTE: To prevent upsetting your BB too much DO NOT clean your filters at this time!! Cleaning the gravel will reduce the BB levels as some will be dislodged and vacuumed up. If your filter gets clogged up from the stirred up dirt you can gently rinse it in some tank water and re-install it, but avoid vigorous or complete cleaning!

I follow the cleaning and water change with a battery of water tests the following day; A, nI, nA, pH, kH, gH, and phosphates. Following a cleaning all your numbers should be quite acceptable, but it's good to verify this rather than assume!

 

[BBradbury]

Your Tank

Hello cam...

You don't need to vacuum the bottom material. The organic material that falls to the bottom of the tank dissolves in the water and nourishes the plants. If you don't have plants, then remove it through a weekly water change to maintain clean water conditions. The bottom material is also home to some of the beneficial bacteria. Vacuuming will remove it. You don't need to go to the extra work.

B

 

[BillD]

I would agree with the post above. If you have lots of plants, don't vacuum the gravel. Remove the unsightly visible stuff sitting on the gravel, but don't clean the gravel.

 

[jrc0528]

That works for about a 9 months, then the algae starts taking over! I just let the algae bloom be my indicator that a gravel cleaning is in order. The algea bloom means the debris int he gravel has built up to where it is providing more nutrients than the plants can consume. Your interval may vary, I also use CO2 injection maintaining 15-30 ppm at all times (my CO2 runs with the lights), so my plants aren't CO2 limited and will consume more nutrients. Without CO2 you likely will have algae problems sooner (perhaps 4-6 months), but even that is better than trying to do weekly or even monthly gravel cleanings in a planted tank!

This is a great time for me to also thin out the now overgrown plants, selling/relocating/discarding the excess plants. Works out well for me since I have to pull the plants to properly vacuum anyways.

As stated, a quick top cleaning of what you can get to works well for quite a while. Once testing shows your WCs aren't keeping the parameters in order or the algae takes off you'll have to consider a deeper cleaning.