Cleaning A Established But Very Dirty Tank

[karin]

Hi all. New to the forum. Pretty amazing site. Here is my problem... well the one I will share with you all. ;-)))

I just bought a used and established 29 gallon tank. The guy who had it, had over stocked it (rather the fish all grew way to large) and had grown tired of cleaning it. So I got a good deal on it and just gave away six of the very very large inhabitants (i.e., bela shark, kissing gouramis, angel fish). The tank gravel and bottom surface is very dirty and littered with what I assume to be old food and poop. I would like to know what you think I should do to catch up on the tank cleaning/maintenance. Here is other info:

There is one albino cory, another 2 inch catfish-like fish, an African butterfly fish, and a long stick-looking fish that behaves like a sucker fish??? (Can you identify?)
These guys will stay for now.

There is an underground filter and right now only one of the rises has an air stone, which when I turned it on, it belched gunk out into the tank. But that one is running. There is also an Aquaclear 150 hang-off the back filter. I just changed the charcol filter on the one active riser for the underground filter. I just also changed out the part of the AquaClear 150 filter intended to deal with amonia (the white gravel stuff). I was told to switch out only one element of the 3 in the Aqua Clear filter... wait and then change out another after two weeks.

I cleaned up the sides but it is the rot in the gravel that worries and repulses me. I'm happy to start vacuming the gravel but want to do it in a way that doesn't jeapordize the existing fish.

So bring on the advice!

Thank you in advance.

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome to the forum Karin.
You are in an enviable position for a new fish keeper. You so far have a functional filter that can be made better fairly quickly. The functional filter is the AC150. It sounds like the person who sold you the tank got tired of looking after the undergravel filter and just replaced it with the AC. Since you have significantly reduced your fish load in the tank, it will now have a surplus of processing capability in the filter. If you suspect the previous owner did very few water changes, and the tank now has the water that was in it when you bought the tank, the first thing you need to know is that an old tank can have the water slowly go bad while the fish that are in the tank do fine. If you abruptly improve the water quality it can kill the fish. That is called old tank syndrome and you may possibly be confronted with it. With a 29 gallon, you could do daily water changes of 2 or 3 gallons of water for a couple of weeks and gradually improve the tank's water quality. If you don't still have the old water in the tank, you don't need to worry about any effect that water changes will have on the fish. Any shock to the fish is already history.
The way to treat a used but not well maintained tank is to decide the direction that you want to go with it. If you are not happy with the ornaments, cleaning the old ones will be a waste of time. If you don't like the current gravel, you still need to clean it because you don't want the stuff in it to end up floating around in the tank water. It is my guess that the UGF cannot be properly rejuvenated short of emptying the tank and doing a good clean under the filter plate. It is better left off until you can remove it.

How to treat that AC filter is simple. Step one, do not buy any new media for it. I know the manual says to change it out in stages, but that is a poor idea in most cases. Instead, you take a bucket of your water change water and rinse out all of the media in the bucket. Then you reload the media into the filter and resume using it. After a few years, yes years, you find that one or another part of the media is just falling apart. At that point you can indeed replace that part.

This leaves us with how to clean that gravel. You want a right sized gravel vac, not the biggest one you can find but one that is easy to maneuver in the tank. You gravel vac thoroughly in one spot by plunging the cleaning end right to the bottom of the gravel and watching the dirt go through the tube into your bucket. When that bit of gravel is clean, lift the tube and move to a new spot. Over the course of several water changes you should be able to get rid of all the waste in the gravel. At that point you could remove the gravel safely followed by the UGF filter plate.

A long stick looking sucker fish could be one of many. Try looking up flying fox, Siamese algae eater, Chinese algae eater, otocinclus and who knows what else. There are also things called farowella that are a very odd stick-like shape. Google is your friend when it comes to wanting to see pictures of fish we might suggest. Whenever I google a fish name, I get 3 or 4 pictures in a row across the top of the search window and if any look promising you can go to where the picture is stored and get a better look. When I googled farowella it came up with this.

 

[karin]

That's it! Its a farlowella! Thank you.

And thanks for all the other advice. Sounds like I can do the water change/gravel vac simultaneously and do that daily at 2-3 gallons.

If I shut down the UGF then the only filter is the AC 150... will that be sufficient for a 29 gallon tank? And, while I know it is controversial, should I think about reinstalling the UGF or changing the filtering system in any other way? And should I augment aeration while only using the AC filter?

Thanks so much. In one evening this forum has been a wealth of info for me.

k

 

[Tolak]

Welcome to TFF!

The AC 150 has been renamed in the last few years, to the AC 30, to reflect tank size in gallons. The old number, 150, represented gallons per hour. Other than this it is the same filter.

I used to run AC 200's, which have been renamed to AC 50's, on heavily stocked 29 gallon tanks, breeding setup. For an average stocking the 150 will be fine on it's own.

As long as you have some surface motion from the AC you will have no problem with aeration. Bubbles by themselves don't add O2 to the water, the motion they create on the surface does. This is due to the friction between moving water & air, you are transferring O2 to the water. You are also transferring water to the air, but this is really nothing to worry about with a single tank, the slight humidity increase shouldn't affect anything.

If the old ugf and gravel are that dirty they really aren't doing their job, much like a dirty furnace filter. I would shut it down, and as OM47 stated, deal with a tank dismantlement in the future. You may find a substrate you like better, this would be the time for a tear down. I did this long ago with an inherited 55 gallon.

That AC is a good filter, I used to run dozens, until the electrical cord mayhem forced me to a centralized system. I tried my best to kill them, running equipment through its paces is a little side thing I do. If another brand ran better I would have run them, test filters of other brands got put into a box, to be eventually sold.

 

[waterdrop]

Good morning Karin, OM47 and Tolak and welcome to TFF Karin,

Totally agree with all the good advice from OM47 and Tolak but I have noted one concern here. One of the popular types of replacement media that AC makes readily available on the LFS shelves are mesh bags filled with Zeolite granules. That sounds like what Karin picked up and replaced in her AquaClear, since she says "white gravel stuff."

Now probably this filter is so mature that having a bunch of its ammonia sucked away by the zeolite resin won't have hurt it too badly but what do we collectively think? I wonder if that zeolite would be better changed out for a bag of ceramic chunks, which AC also sell in nice sizes the fit the AC filters closely. Alternatively, a nice jar of Seachem Matrix or Eheim Substat Pro or one of the other high surface area biomedia choices would go in there nicely. We can probably safely assume the 150 has a large sponge that is doing the main biomedia job currently.

Karin, the concern with zeolite is that it is a chemical resin that takes up ammonia and it is so efficient at it that, especially when it is new, it can take away virtually all the ammonia that is feeding the beneficial bacteria that we need in the biofilter. Zeolite would be great except that at some point its capacity to remove ammonia suddenly stops and at that point the deadly ammonia can quickly become too high.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[karin]

Okay, had no idea about the zeolite. Thanks. I'll look for the ceramic medium.

Again would you just go with the AC filter and eventually just forgo the UGF?

And regarding the bag of carbon charcol in the filter.... I get that this does very little but it is good to have a new one around incase you have to medicate the tank. What should be going into that AC filter? Do I go with AC little bags? and Spongers? Make my own?

Thanks everyone. Things have changed since I last owned a tank some 15 years ago... or at least the internet has made the info so much more available.

K

 

[drobbyb]

It all depends on what you want to do. That's the beauty of AC filters, versatility. In mine I have a filter sponge on the bottom followed by the ceramic rings and finally my bag of crushed coral. If you wanted to you could add a second sponge to replace the carbon packet, or add more ceramic rings. Really it's up to you.

 

[waterdrop]

re the UG filter, as Tolak said, its probably not very effective at this point because both the area under the UG plates (which should be totally clear and open) are probably clogged with stuff and also the gravel itself is probably clogged and therefor not letting much water flow through. But there's no reason that still having the airline (or electric powerhead, which is it anyway?) hooked up and letting the UG run would anything and if you've just put fresh carbon in there then you might as well get your three days of tank freshening out of it. (Carbon is only good for about 3 days and then is ready to be removed and tossed. Which is why most of us don't use it except for special uses like removing meds or yellow tannins from wood etc.)

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

If the flow through the UGF has been stagnant for a long time, as I thought I saw described in the first post, you can end up with anaerobic bacteria under the filter plate. You really would not want to stir that into the water column all at once. The sudden shift in bacterial populations can be dramatic and the die off of the anaerobic bacteria may have unintended consequences.

The carbon in the filter does no harm and probably contains part of the mature biological filter that is on the tank. If you did add zeolite to the filter, it should come out and be replaced by a ceramic or similar media. Even zeolite has a use for clearing chemicals from the water like carbon can but again it is for inorganic chemicals, not the same things as carbon, which works better for organic compounds. Carbon will have almost no effect on ammonia, from a purely chemistry point of view, but can be a half decent biological media until it starts to break down. It is not very durable in your filter so it will be the first thing to start to break down. That 2 week wait that you were going to do before changing any media would be a good time to wait before changing the carbon for something likely to be a better media. That is 2 weeks after you replace the zeolite with a biological media of some sort. After the carbon is replaced, or you decide to just use carbon and do a routine change every week or two, you again would just rinse the media in your filter and not toss anything but the carbon packets.

 

[waterdrop]

Ah! Good point about the potential bad situation if its been stagnant OM47! I stand corrected. I would not want to run the UG plate if that were the case.

~~waterdrop~~