Getting Gravel Properly Clean

[Lizzie71]

I have light coloured gravel in my smaller tank, and over time it has started to look filthy. I do a gravel vac once a week but that doesn't really get it clean. When I used to keep goldfish a few years back, I used to get all the gravel out every few months and wash it in tap water, but I now understand that isn't the right thing.

So how can I get it sparkly clean again? Is taking it out for a wash a big no-no?

 

[Colin_T]

when you gravel vac do you actually push the gravel cleaner into the gravel or do you just siphon the gunk off the top of it?
Most gravel cleaners are designed to be pushed into the gravel and the rubbish trapped in it gets drawn up and out with some of the water. If you do a gravel clean on the tank each day for a week it should come up pretty good. Replace the water removed by the gravel cleaning with dechlorinated water that has a similar PH and temperature to the tank.

 

[Lizzie71]

Yes, that's what I do but it never comes up properly clean

 

[Bignose]

So how can I get it sparkly clean again? Is taking it out for a wash a big no-no?

The things here is that a well-matured tank is going to have a rich, full, biofilm on everything.

Here is a series of articles written by Skeptical Aquarist on biofilm

http/www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/biofilm/devbio.shtml
http/www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/biofilm/molds.shtml
http/www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/biofilm/yeasts.shtml
http/www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/biofilm/measure.shtml
http/www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/biofilm/surscum.shtml

The biofilm contains a whole host of different bacterias that consume many different things in the tank. This biofilm is also good for help ameliorate emergencies. If the filter breaks one evening, having a rich biofilm can be the difference between waking up with a tank full of ammonia poisoned fish or just some slightly stresed fish. The ammonia oxidizing bacteria live in the biofilm, too, along with many other species of molds and yeasts. The biofilm are also hosts to a lot of microorganisms that fish like to eat, especially young or smaller fish. Snails too.

This biofilm coats everything in the tank, including the gravel. The gravel has lots of surface area for it to form. So, you don't want your gravel to be sparkly clean -- you destroy this very beneficial biofilm every time you do that. If you can't stand the mess, you might want to consider darker gravel (as an added benefit, your fish usually show brighter colors if the substrate is darker). But, as the Skeptical Aquarist himself says, he rarely sticks the siphon in the gravel to suck all that stuff out, he only sucks the loose detritus off the top. He wants to encourage the biofilm to grow.

 

[fergalthefish]

i know how you feel lizzie but it's impossible to have a sparkly tank all the time - anyway in nature fish don't live in pristine places so sometimes you have to put up with a bit of 'untidiness' .

 

[Bignose]

when you gravel vac do you actually push the gravel cleaner into the gravel or do you just siphon the gunk off the top of it?
Most gravel cleaners are designed to be pushed into the gravel and the rubbish trapped in it gets drawn up and out with some of the water. If you do a gravel clean on the tank each day for a week it should come up pretty good. Replace the water removed by the gravel cleaning with dechlorinated water that has a similar PH and temperature to the tank.

don't forget the hardness, which may actually be the most important one there. A lot of time what is mistakenly called pH shock is actually a hardness shock. The issue is that fish have the physiological mechanisms to change their pH in response the environments -- but they can only perform those mechanisms if the dissolved minerals in the water are favorable.

Rather than type is all out again, here ( http/www.fishforums.net/content/forum/20...-Home-Aquarium/ ) is a good summary of the information I've gathered to date.

Oftentimes, a change in hardness and a change in pH are related (hence it is typical for water to be soft and acidic or for water to be hard and basic), but not always. If you look at ( http/www.aquariaplants.com/waterchemistry.htm ) and read the section on pH, the author deduced this hardness shock from his own experience -- he talks about how he could move fish from water with the same hardness just different pHs due to CO2 injection just fine, but changes in hardness (specifically high hardness to low hardness) is deadly.

So, that's why you need to make sure to match all three, temperature, pH, and hardness. If you've been using the same tap water to fill the tanks, this probably is not an issue. But, it is important to mention all three parameters that need to be matched.