Wierdness w/ water...

[JasonC]

Okay... so I did a 25% PWC about 3 days ago... w/ gravel vac, and when I replaced the water, I got a huge cloud of detritus stirred back up. As I had just put a payment on some fish to be delivered soon, the next night I did a big 50%+ PWC with a *heavy* vac and removed *huge* ammounts of stuff... and by huge I mean my plastic plant holders were filled with crap.

Now based on what I have been reading, stirring up that much stuff, I should have seen an ammonia spike after doing this or something, but I have seen nothing.

In fact, I am awful confused as with all this rotting matter in the bottom of my tank (and I know I didnt get all of it), I would have though that I would be seeing high nitrAte levels also, but for the life of my tank, my nitrAtes have stayed below 10ppm.

My levels as of this morning are 0 Ammonia, 0 Nitrite, 5 Nitrate, pH 7.4, temp 75F.

Stocking list is in my sig, and I would like to emphasize that I have plastic plants and gravel substrate. I'm pretty sure I am testing correctly, even checked directions again. And test kit (ap master) is less than 6 months old.

Is this something I should be concerned about? is having too little Nitrate(vs ammount of detritius) even a problem? What is going on in my tank? Other than the chemicals, the only thing i see as "wrong" in my tank is a touch of diatoms around the tank... nothing major though.

Any ideas on this one?

 

[neilanh]

I wouldn't be concerned. The low nitrate is probably because it sounds like you do really good about regular water changes. The stuff you collected was slowly decaying and being converted. Stirring things up can cause a spike, but in an aged and properly maintained aquarium I'm not surprised you haven't seen anything out of it.

 

[JasonC]

Well thats comforting to hear! With the way this tank started out, I have started expecting the worst... need to break that habit ;P

So out of curiosity, with all the gunk that I know is still in the tank, should I be doing a deep clean on a semi-regular basis? I know that the book that I read to prep for my tank(but which has been wrong a number of times) said that I should be breaking down and fully cleaning my tank once a year... basically a restart. Is this right? Seems a bit much.

 

[jsoong]

I don't think you need to do a full tank tear down once a year with good maintanance. You can practically go forever in well maintained setup. What you do is fix a section of the tank at a time through out the life of the tank so it never get bad enough to require a total teardown.

I normally do a deep clean of the tank every week with pwc, but only a 1/4 of the tank at a time. This keeps the tank from collecting too much gunk overtime. <Also it is planted, so I have to leave some gunk for the plants!> Since goldies make a lot more waste than tropicals, you can prob get by with less in a tropical tank. But once a week is an easy schedule to follow.

 

[JasonC]

I typically am doing 25% a week w/ a good gravel vac over half the tank... I typically dont try to dig deeper than the 1st 1/2" of gravel though. To go back to the original issue, i started to get concerned with the cloud of debris that appears when I pour water back in the tank... seems to undo everything I just did. Is there a better way to put water back in the tank that doesnt muck everything up again?

 

[jsoong]

You can put the water in slowly. If you are using a bucket, put the bucket somewhere higher than the tank, then set up a siphon with a piece of small tubing (air line perhaps) and let the water go in slowly. If you direct the water outlet onto a solid surface (a flat rock perhaps, or a large decoration), you should not kick up anything from your substrate.

<I used to do this with a 10 gal. It takes 5-10 min to run in 2-3 gal of water, but slow flow means no muck in the water.>