White Gravel In New Tank

[charlyking]

Its been a week and the stone has startes going green. Please can I have tips on maintaining the whiteness, I dont want to change the colour and dont mind putting the work in. Would a gravel cleaner work?? The gravel is quite coarse.

Any advice would be appreciated

 

[onidrase]

just get a gravel siphoning vac from the LFS and do the best you can, that's all I can think of.

Though, if you have a light on your tank, the fish will appreciate the green tint on it, the bright color of the gravel may stress them a bit, because it reflects the light back up at them.

 

[Cazgar]

When I first did my tank, I had white gravel too.
It looked lovely, but in a very short space of time it started to look green like yours.
No amount of vaccing, water changes, less light made any difference.
I eventually removed it & changed to black.
My fish seemed to develop a deeper colur with the black too.

 

[three-fingers]

White reflects light very well...and green shows up lots on it. Sorry to have to say this but unless you have very dim lighting in your tank (or a perfectly balanced fully planted tank...which would look terrible with white gravel IMO), algae will grow on the gravel and theres nothing you can do other than regularly replace the gravel with clean stuff.

I have a client whom I set up a 4' tall tank and he was totally inflexible in wanting just white sand and rocks plus bright lighting .

Only reason it works is he's happy to pay the cost for replacement sand eve very few months.

With the rocks I just replace them over every few weeks with freshly bleached and scrubbed ones. You could do the same with white gravel, have some cleaned (use bleach then get rid of the bleach with a large dose of dechlorinator and rinse) and ready in a bucket for changing over whenever it goes dirty.

 

[doresy]

I think that just about all fish keepers fancied or had some kind of white gravel at one time or another (me included) just to see it turn green!

I have light coloured coral gravel (for African Cichlids) which I completely turn over every 2 weeks with a gravel vac and that keeps it very nice

 

[charlyking]

Thanks for everyones advice I have now changed to Coral Gravel and it looks lush