how to clean gravel with plants?

ballinhawaiian

ballinhawaiian

volley/fish freak
Aug 9, 2006
19
0
0
40
goleta, ca
Are there any tricks to cleaning the gravel in my tank without uprooting my plants? The gravel is starting to look brown in the parts around my plants and I would love to clean that part of the substrate with my siphoning tube, but i'm afraid that if I pull the plants out that it will disturb their growth. Any tips on this kind of cleaning?
 
simply put, you don't vacuum the gravel in a planted tank. the fish poop makes great fertilizer. only vacuum places where there are no plants.
 
makes sense, guess i'll just have to get more plants then eh? Thanks for the responses
 
I try to do a good job, but I hate when I knock a plant out or bump a delicate peice of driftwood that was held in place by 3 slates, then BOOM the slate gets knocked off, the driftwood goes flying for the top (since its not fully water logged yet) and about 5 plants come loose... :sigh: I just try to get the bare parts now... and if my syphon is to big to get to a specific place I just leave it alone... as long as my water parims are good, I chalk it up as "looking natural" not "dirty" lol.
 
Wow, I never thought of the fish poop fertilizing the plants. I'm glad I read from this site, I have been vacuuming all over the place and even uprooting some of the new plants and replanting them after the "cleaning". I guess I'm lucky that they are still alive after all the changing I've been doing. I do have a question about it though. Since I have Cichlids, they tend to produce a lot of waste and I am worried that if I don't vacuum where the plants are that the ammonia will start to creep up. Do the plants preven this from happening? Thanks
 
If your biofilter is working, of which plants are a small part of, you won't have measureable amonia in your mature tank. The end product Nitrate can build up if the plants are not useing as much as the fish produce.

If you have messy fish you can use the syphon to pick up the stuff on top of the gravel to remove it befor it breaks down. I just gently agitate with the end of the syphon just over the substrate. If the plants are thick I may push down between them or close to them to try to pull up what they have trapped, but I don't clean below the surface where they are planted.
 
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I'm most defintely going to get more plants, but first I must get a better light. It's only a 15w (11000K) high-output, for a 10g and I get growth but not the kind of eye catching stuff that I would like. So until then, i'll deal with my platy poop lying in the plants. My levels are good ammonia (0), nitrite(0), nitrate 30ppm, a little higher than I would like, but i'm holding a betta for a friend that would've given it a horrible little home in a cup, so I put it in a fry breeder in my 10g in hopes of getting a 60g from a friend and transfering the community to the bigger tank and give the veil tail betta a whole 10g's to himself!!!! I hope he's a nice betta, I really would like to put him in the 60g, but i'm not sure if he's nice just yet. Will have to do some tests first. Well, back to the plants, I hope to cover the floor in something fantastic and get it as good looking as most of you veterans out there!!!!!!
 
yeah, I had a really hard time getting my head around the concept of NOT vacuuming the gravel thoroughly. Without plants, it is recommended to dig your siphon down as far as possible to remove every last scrap of poop or food. I had a hard time breaking that habit now that I have moderately to densely planted tanks. As said, you can continue vacuuming all the way through the gravel in the spots where there are no plants. Where you have plants, just skim the surface to remove superficial waste. As said, the wastes around the plant roots will act as fertilizer.

That's another reason for plant-specific substrates. They are porous so will absorb broken down waste and food, whereas with gravel will not. Thus you get ammonia spikes in the water if you don't vacuum. However, if you have plant substrate, it will hold onto ammonia/nitrate instead of releasing it into the water column.
 
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