For aquarium owners–a technical question and a silly rant:
My wife loves her aquarium -and spends WAY too much time taking care of it. Why do you have to vacuum the bottom every 3 weeks using a 2-inch wide sludge extractor? Isn’t there a better way to build an ecosystem? Why not have a grid on the bottom, that supports the pretty colored gravel, but lets the organic waste settle below the grid. Then have a filter/water pump device that would clean the space under the grid?
And now a semi-rant:
I know a couple who have a big fancy aquarium, built into the wall. They divorced, and the one who kept the house doesnt know how to take care of the aquarium. So the fish died. But–here’s the kicker: it just doesn’t matter.!!!
The aquarium still “functions”–it has pretty rocks and plants, a nice photographic background, a stream of oxygen bubbles floating around. And it makes a great conversation piece. People come to visit, and after a while suddenly realize there arent any fish in there. To which he responds "Yeah, but it’s just as pretty that way ". And he’s right.
Um…I don’t vacuum the bottom every 3 weeks. It’s more like every 3 months, and the tank looks just fine thankyouverymuch.
The larger the tank, the easier it is to keep clean (as, the more stable the ecosystem is). By having a strong filter, several scavengers to pick up extra food, a good magnet algae scraper, and occasionally stirring up the gravel to let loose the sludge (not necessarily vacuuming it, but disturbing it so the filter can…uh…filter it), the tank stays healthy, clean, and attractive.
How big is her tank? (And BTW–changing water every 3 weeks can actually disturb the water cycle and create more problems than it solves.)
I’ve got a friend with a huge salt water tank, and he changes out half the water every month. He runs a hose from the tank to the outside to empty it, then refills it from a trash can filled with water that has been treated and allowed to sit a while.
I’m not a fish person, but that doesn’t make sense to me - if you keep it properly filtered, why should you have to change the water at all? I always figured fish were a low-maintenance sort of pet as long as you kept the tank disease-free. I don’t bother asking him because no matter what anyone says, he always knows better. Even though he lost half his fish one year…
Funny you should mention that Zenster. This morning I caught one of our cats crouched on top of ours, fishing. After dumping him off it occurred to me that maybe I should have celebrated the cycle of life and left him to his own devices. I hate that damned aquarium - the 2 gold fish our daughter brought home from the fair are now 10 years old!
I guess I’ve been maintaining the thing incorrectly all this time. And what a giant pain in the kiester it is: I empty the whole blasted thing out (10 gallon tank), clean everything and put it all back together about every two months.
oh boy, there’s a whole lot to be said in this thread :rolleyes:
Firstly, what the OP is talking about is similar to an undergravel filter. However, these aren’t that effective. Deutritis (ie, crap) just settles on the top surface or beneath the gravel. If you have plants, the UGF can clog and result in anaerobic bacterial growth (which is bad). Reverse-flow UGFs are a better option. These push water UP through the gravel to prevent anything from settling on the bottom. There’s still much debate about how useful these really are. Realistically, in a properly maintained tank, they don’t provide any benefit.
Now, onto tank maintenance. Water changes and gravel cleaning are NOT the same; they are two different maintenance tasks. Small water changes should be done frequently; I typicall do about 20% once a week (some people do like 15% 2 or 3 times a week). About once a month I do a gravel cleaning and filter cleaning. Cleaning the filter means RINSING the filter media in tank water!! Do NOT actually clean it! The bacteria growing on the media supports the tank’s ecosystem.
If water changes are a hassle, get this device called the Python. You connect it to your sink faucet and run it to your tank. It acts like a pump and eliminates the need for buckets. You can drain and refil your tank all in one go. Its very useful.
koeeoaddi
You should not be changing out the whole tank! Not monthly, not ever. Goldfish are pretty dirty, so do maybe a 25% water change once a week. Follow what I said above. You probably aren’t using a gravel vacuum…get one!
FairyChatMom
The reason you sill have to perform water changes is not so much because of “gunk” in the water, its because of chemicals. I won’t go into the details of the so-called “aquarium cycle”, but needless to say, fish poop, poop feeds bacteria, bacteria contaminate water. In a well-established tank, the “beneficial bateria” (which you have in your filter and in the gravel) keep toxic levels low. But even then, toxicities will build up over time. That is why water changes are still necessary. chappachula
If you get one of the above mentioned Python devices, tank maintenance becomes a virtual non-issue.
In freshwater aquariums, there really isn’t a way in such a small microcosm to setup a fully-functioning waste-processing ecosystem. Actually, that’s not true, but most aquariums are stocked with way more fish than such a system could support, hence the manual removal of detritus. Some of the water has to be removed to prevent buildup of nitrates, the end product of aerobic nitrification. It’s easy to use the vacuum, or “sludge extractor” at the same time as siphoning off the water. Heavily planted aquariums require fewer water changes, and vacuuming isn’t necessary, as the plants utilize nutrients in the mulm and detritus that settles into the gravel.
In saltwater aquariums, it is possible, with a plenum or deep sandbed, in addition to “live rock”, to create conditions in which the nitrate will be further broken down to nitrogen gas, which then bubbles off into the atmosphere. In such systems, reef keepers often go a year or more without water changes, since nitrates don’t build up in their systems. Such systems have been attempted with freshwater, but IMO, there isn’t as wide of a variety of microbes and invertebrates in a standard FW system to break down the fish waste, extra food, etc, and a lower chance of having the correct organisms for fully processing waste.
For any system, however, water changes are a good idea because they dilute any compounds that may be building up in the tank. For instance, minerals would build up over time as water evaporates and is replaced, leading to harder and harder water in the tank, if water changes aren’t done.
Having bottom-feeding fish helps, and lots of live plants will keep the bottom dirt to a minimum. The crypt family of plants are easy to grow and are quite lovely. My aquarium light is on a timer so that the tank gets about 8 hours of light per day. If I leave it on longer, I tend to get too much algae. The magnetic algae scraper is a great thing (no mess!) to use to stir up the water a bit so the filter can catch more of the dirt.
Changing more than 25% of the water at any given time is a bad idea, as it will disrupt the ecosystem.
I think someone hinted at this already, but perhaps your wife is overfeeding her fish? Uneaten food is likely a large portion of the sludge she vacuums out.
How do you feel about ‘powered filters’ - the kind that fit on the uplift tube and have a wheel or pad of some kind that the water flows over?
Are the air-powered bottom vacs effective? We pull a fair amount of crud out using a siphon-type vac, but that necessitates a significant water change in the process. I think we could be keeping the tank cleaner if we could avoid massive, overly frequent water changes.
Well, I was all ready to go into a fairly long fish rant but Trigonal Planar and fizgig pretty much said what I was going to say with probably a lot less profanity. (It was a long day at the fish store) I’ll an eye on this thread to see if anything else pops up I can address.
Hey Jimmy, you work at a fish store? I used to work at one too
mdf: The whole point of those devices IS to remove the water! Doing a gravel cleaning without a water change is pointless. The water change is really the most important part (people with planted tanks may not gravel vac. at all).
I replace ~%25 a week, sometimes I go two weeks. I understand the importance of water changes in a tank without plants. What I’m saying is that by the time I’ve removed ~5 gallons of water, I’m still getting lots of material pulled up from the gravel. I want to avoid replacing too much water, while still getting as much of the crud as possible. Hence the question about the air-powered vacs - the kind that dumps whatever it pulls up into a fabric strainer and allows the water to run back into the tank. I could do a much more thorough cleaning if this device is worthwhile.
How to clean all the gravel sans changing too much water? Simple: don’t clean it all at once. Gravel clean say 1/4 of the tank today, the next 1/4 next week, and so on. Clean as much gravel as you can without going below 20-25%. Then wait until next time to clean the next section. If you get the same amount of crap building back up in that area in only a week, you know you’re over stocked/over feeding.
Chappachula, your idea for an auto gravel cleaner may seem good in theory, but it simply won’t work - I know since I have that exact set up. I made mine as an undergravel filter though, with a section of eggcrate (that rigid plastic grid with 1cm square holes) supported an inch off the bottom with the large (again, about 1cm diameter) gravel on top. Have the filter set up so it draws water from under the grid. Some crap sifts through, probably 75% does not. You still have to clean the gravel if you don’t want it to plug up.
Planted tanks don’t do much in the way of removing physical debris from the water or bottom. They’ll take up some of the chemical byproducts of the crud’s decomposition, but that’s it. Stir up the bottom of your planted tank someday, you’ll see. The crud’s still there, it’s just not as much of an issue… unless you have big fish who like to dig and/or a strong current.
An aquarium probably won’t turn flourescent pink and explode if it’s not cleaned regularly, but don’t think that it “works” just fine despite being dirty. There’s a reason the fish died, and it’s chemical ie pretty much invisible. You can support say 6 guppies in a 50 gallon tank by doing nothing at all but throwing in a little food every week. But you should be able to support 10 times that many. Sorta like looking at an abandoned factory and saying “see? the buildings are still standing and the grass around it is still green… what was with all those workers coming and going every day - quite unnecesary”. Partly right and partly wrong.
