125 Gallon cleaning regiment advice.

[pstergiou78]

So I've had a 125 gallon freshwater setup with angelfish, and wanted to get some feedback on my cleaning regiment.

Every two weeks clean the 3 marineland emporer 400 filters with tank water.

Every month clean the marineland C220 with tank water and replace charcoal.

Every month do a gravel vac with the aqueon water changer.

Weekly do a 15% water change and algae scrape.

I recently had a ammonia spike after installing all new filters in all 3 emporer 400 filters. Lesson learned and fixed with adding beneficial bacteria and two 50% water changes. I will now add beneficial bacteria after every cleaning them, and not changing all at once so I don't kill all the bacteria.

Advice welcome. Thanks

[Delapool]

Hi, yes - I was going to suggest staggering the filter cleans just in case. Over time though the bacterial population should get stronger and just see how dirty the filters are getting. I have an internal filter to push water around and clean that every several weeks extremely well (it's mainly a mechanical filter so I don't care on bacteria) and then have two canister filters that I clean less often than I should.

I quickly looked up the filters and wasn't sure if you are getting good flow. If you get any muck/detritus accumulating in corners, may need a powerhead to push muck to filters.

Filters all sounds good though, mainly I would increase water changes to 20 to 30% weekly and also gravel vac weekly.

If algae is persistent week by week on glass, then I'd drop lighting to 6 hrs and then increase back up slowly.

I have a 150gal and do ~25% weekly (can't gravel vac much as planted). The internal filter is a fluval U4 which pushes water ~2ft before it starts to circle back. I've thought about putting a powerhead on other side but canister outlets are on that far side and I inject CO2 at either end of tank.

[pstergiou78]

That sounds great, I will stagger the cleaning. I am debating adding plants, as the tank had plants before, which I have moved to my smaller 46 gallon. The reason I moved the plans was because my huge red hook silver dollar, and his smaller silver dollar friends were eating the plants. I also have a very large pleco which was burrowing and taking up the plants. Do you have a recommendation of plants that the plecos and silver dollars are no interested in? Thanks much.

[Delapool]

Originally Posted by pstergiou78

That sounds great, I will stagger the cleaning. I am debating adding plants, as the tank had plants before, which I have moved to my smaller 46 gallon. The reason I moved the plans was because my huge red hook silver dollar, and his smaller silver dollar friends were eating the plants. I also have a very large pleco which was burrowing and taking up the plants. Do you have a recommendation of plants that the plecos and silver dollars are no interested in? Thanks much.

Plastic???

Sadly no - maybe Java Fern but nothing off the top of my head.