Awkward Shaped Tank, Messy Fish, Doing The House Up, Pita!

[Miss Wiggle]

trigon 350.... 92 us gallons, 1 tiger oscar, 1 albino common plec, 1 common syno for anyone that couldn't guess which of my tanks i was on about from the topic title!

we're really struggling with the maintenance at the moment, current set up is with sand as a substrate, few bits of wood, loads of rocks and amazon swords and java fern on the wood and rocks, here's a pic a few months ago, plants have bushed out a lot since then.

i really wish i hadn't got this tank for him now because the shape is a nightmare, but we've no room or money to upgrade it now so we just have to make do and make the best of it. At least the tanks big enough none of the fish will get stunted or anything, it's just a PITA for us. They're big mess machines and all the poop gets caught up in the plants and rocks, we stupidly didn't scrub the big bit of wood before it went into the tank and it's dropped loads of splinters of wood that get caught into the siphon and you have to stop all the time. The design of the cabinet is such that we can't get a really big filter underneath there and the externals we have are hard to reach for maintenance. Also one of them is broke which doesn't help but we're getting the parts to fix it this weekend so that's not the issue really.

I'm 5'7 and even stood on a stool I can't reach the back corner of the tank with the siphon so Ian's ended up doing nearly all the maintenance on this tank. Between looking after his high tech planted tank and doing the house up he's not getting much time to look after it properly and I can't do it so it's ending up getting neglected. It'll get a decent water change and vac from Ian every couple of weeks and in between I try to just do big water changes (powerhead and a hose pipe method) even though i can't vac properly to make up for it . We really need to come up with some way's of making the tank easier to look after as the last thing we want to do is end up with the fish suffering. I'd even consider re-homing them but we just can't find a decent home for Oscar and I won't see him go to the lfs to sit in a 3' tank for months then die.

we're trying to think of ways to make it easier to look after and I'd really appreciate any suggestions from you lot. our current thoughts are

swap the sand for gravel as it's easier to vac
remove the plants so waste can't build up around the roots
get/make a longer gravel vac to reach the back of the tank easier

i've heard of people putting powerheads near the base of the tank to move waste around, does this actually work and do you think it could help? I'm thinking even if we just get 1 at the back blasting forward it'd move the waste where I can reach it to vac.

I know the ideal situation is to swap the tank for soemthing like a 5x2x2 but we simply do not have the space, this is the only shape tank that we can fit in the house that gives enough water volume for the fish.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

or even maybe make it bare bottom... would that help?

 

[sophos9]

I'm glad I did not buy one of these, I went for the vision instead....

Can you not make a longer powervac by attaching some additional hose? Not being sure about how much waste your fish produce, can you plant it out so the plants deal with a load of the mess?

If you change to gravel then won't the waste be even hard to sort out, at least with sand it sits on top

When you say you change the water using the powerhead & hose pipe, what do you mean - water in our out?

 

[Miss Wiggle]

it's a lovely tank and with a standard community set up it'd be fine, but for high waste fish it's not great.

and if your not familiar with oscars and plecs these are seriously high waste fish!!

yup we're planning on either buying a longer vac or just extending it. But I think even with a longer vac it's gonna be a nightmare.

it's kind of hard to explain but when your vaccing sand you have to get the height above it just right to suck up the poo and not the sand, now try doing that when your stood on a stool (and terrified of heights, yes even a foot or two off the floor) leaning 3 feet over a fishtank and looking down into the water where your vision is distorted. with gravel you can just poke the vac into the gravel so less prescision is needed.

we have a powerhead attached to a length of hose, put it in the tank and the other end in the sink and it pumps the water out, then turn the powerhead off and attach the hose to the tap and put the water back in. Easy way of getting water in and out of the tank but doesn't clean the substrate.