Cleaning Issues...

[mark.w.jones]

I must admit I have a fair amount of crud to remove even from a 10gallon tank. May I ask why youre hugely worried about it. If you were getting high levels of ammonia or nitrate in your tank before your next clean was due, say after 5 days then maybe it would be more of a worry but from the sounds of things you are not. Are you sure it's not a case of it looks worse than it actully is.

Also, people like to see the crap they are hoovering up as it makes them feel they are doing a better job. Imagine if you were hoovering and you saw nothing coming up your siphon at all, how would that feel?

Why do you think Dyson makes a transparant case to hold all the dust on its cleaners? Just to make people feel they are doing a better job IMO. Its all rubbish of course, as loads of vaccuums do an equally good and better job than a Dyson. But Dyson sells far more vacuum cleaners because of this gimick.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

This is one of the main reasons why i changed over to sand (plus it looks really good too), its much easier to keep clean as it doesn't trap muck in it like gravel does, muck just floats on the top of the sand which makes it easy to clean up, i rarely clean my substrate at all in some of my very strongly filtered tanks and it looks spotless .
Regardless of how dirty your substrate gets though, i'd still advise doing at least a 25-30% water change once a week. Personally i usually do a 40-60% water change once a week on my tanks if i can as i have a lot of heavy waste producing fish in my tanks and i generally find that the fish just seem healthier for the larger water changes .