How often do you completly clean out your tank?

[dom418]

My tank is 135g and has about 100lbs of lace rock in it. I plan on completly taking out the rocks and siphoning the gravel every 6 months or so. Right now I just clean the front of my gravel and where ever I can reach with the siphon every few weeks. Do any of you with large tanks completly take out everything every time you clean your tanks? It just seems like too much work.

[Tyler718]

I have a 150 gal that I'm taking completely taking apart and redoing. The only reason why I'm doing that is because I'm going for a whole new setup with different fish, decor, & substrate.

Before that I just did a weekly water change with vaccuming the gravel everytime I did it. And since I had 2 cannisters I rotated weeks on them.

[Fishiebusiness]

I dont see why one would want to overhaul a tank just for cleaning purposes. Regular water changes and gravel siphonings are more than enough to keep even a large tank clean. Besides, that much disturbance is not good for the stability of a tank.

[GDominy]

I change 50% of my water in my 135 gallon tank weekly. I do a gravel vaccum every week to every other week but rarely get much out of it (heavily planted tank, most waste gets trapped in the plants or sucked into the filters)

[goldfries]

i do my overhaul like once every 9 months (planning to) as i've just got started with this hobby like 4th Q last year.

[Red]

Never ever do I pull apart a whole tank just to clean it, you're just making a lot of work for yourself thats not needed if you're doing regular water changes and the filters are cleaned out periodically, and you will be losing a lot if not all the beneficial bacteria that has built up over time. I find tanks do best without all that much fussing over them, I mean unless nitrites or nitrate levels are up or the fish are looking unhealthy, whats the point, the tank will just have to re-cycle and the fish will probably be more harmed from that than anything, and will stress from the sudden change in chemistry etc.

[Darkangel]

I never do this as a maintainence item. The only time I totally tear down a tank is when I am changeing it. I have left a tank going as long as 10 years with a tank running without ever tearing it down.

[Richer]

Red - I see a little bit of misinformation in your post... please don't take offense to what I'm gonna say. As far as I can tell, "completely" cleaning out your tank doesn't mean taking everything out and scrubbing it. From what I understand, dom418 just wants to know if we bother moving rocks around to get at gravel that hasn't been vaccumed. Regular gravel vacs will not destroy your bacterial colonies. Trust me on this one... once the colonies are established, they are extremely difficult to remove by physical means. Take a look at fluidized bed filters. Basically a continuous dust storm contained in a tube. Bacteria has no problems clinging onto the sand particles in there. Before I got into cichlids I used to do complete gravel vacs once a week on my tanks. I never had problems with mini-cycles occuring. Many ppl here will also tell you that they gravel vac as much as they can. On top of that, if your tank has good filtration, most of your bacterial colonies will resign in your filter(s). So even killing part of your bacterial colony in your substrate/decor won't hurt your tank. One more thing, in an established tank, you should never ever see nitrites present in the water. That means either your biological filters have crashed, you dumped a load of food in your tank (in which case ammonia would be present as well), you put too many fish in there all at once, a combination of all of the above, etc. etc..

Now that I have a Lake Malawi tank (with tons of rock work) I usually only vacuum the gravel that I can easily access. Every once in awhile if I have loads of time and am not feeling particularly lazy, I'll take apart some of the rockwork to vacuum up the gravel there. Needless to say, I'm somewhat of a lazy person, so I don't do it often.

HTH
-Richer

[Archer]

I'm with most of the ppl who say that they simply do water changes and vacuuming, and not totally cleaning out the tank. The hard to reach areas in my tank usually have plants in them, so they take care of the unvacuumed areas as fertilizer.

My main concern with moving rocks out of the tank for cleaning is with the fish freaking out when you take out their caves and hiding places. I might move out a small rock or two, but I keep the bigger rocks/driftwood where they are.

[Pootspete]

I have three tanks and clean twice a week.

[Ozalie]

I change 30/50% of the water weekly in my 125g,by using a gravel vac.the only time I've taken apart a tank is to move it.As for the crap under caves,rocks....I'll do a few each week so the fish are less stressed out,then doing all of them at once .

[dom418]

thanks for all of the help guys. I wasn't planning on tearing down my tank but just wanted to know if it was ok to vacuum the gravel that I could reach. And I got my answer. Besides I have 2 aquaclear 500's with double sponges in each for my mech. filters. For those of you that change 30 to 50% of your water weekly in your large tanks, is your water bill outrageous?

[Ozalie]

No water bill, one of many reasons I like country living verses town!:D

[dom418]

LOL:p I don't think I could afford to dump all that water out each week. I monitor my water parameters weekly and change my water accordingly.

[OrionGirl]

We dump about 60 gallons of water alternate weeks--the SW system, where we can't recycle the water. Otherwise, all the water from the FW changes goes into watering plants. I've considered marketing it--"100% Natural Fertilizer!"

[TTman]

I only completely clean it out if I am moving it. otherwise all I do is take out the decor & gravel siphon every other week. I am always cleaning tanks every week, I alternate between them.

[NJ Devils Fan]

I agree with Fishiebusiness on this.

[rockhead44]

I personally end up doing a complete clean out of a tank only if nessercery.What nessercery means is that I have some sort of break down in within my system.Like when my bottom substance is rotting away my plant at the roots.I have found that after about 2 to 3 years my gravel contains much to much rotted matter causing plants not to grow and also collects some gases needing me to do a complete clean up.To check for the gasses I would stick a stick into the gravel and see the bubbles come out.I forget what gasses actually build up ,maybe someone else knows.I also had to do this to a tank along time ago when one of my guppy tanks had been infected with that guppy disease that is like guppy aids.I lost about 70 fish from it.Nothing worked they just kept dying.Sad time in fish keeping they were some real pretty fish.A complete breakdown and cleaning had to be done.Sometimes I do a partial clean out in an attempt to rid a tank of algae.All this said and done I say that this is my last resort cause we all know the task at hand is time consuming and work.Sorry for the long post .Glad to be a member and hope I can help.