Heavily Planted, use gravel vacuum?

MyShrimpDied

MyShrimpDied

Freddie Freeloader
Jun 2, 2004
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For those of you with heavily planted tanks, do you find it necessary to use a gravel vacum to get the crud of your gravel? I would think with all the plants, the poop that gets to the bottom is used up by the plants and the very little poop that isnt used doesn't make a signifigant difference in nitrite that your nitrite can be controlled by frequent water changes. Not only that, but i would think that you would suffer some plant casualties from all the planting and replanting. What are your thoughts?

~ MYShrimpDied
 
I skim the surface of the bare spots of gravel in my tanks with plants but I don't go digging with the syphon.
 
thanks Snakeice. I was reading your tank specs and i wanted to know what kind of hood you have, i also have a 20 gallon tank and i kinda have poor lighting, just a 16" flouro bulb. im not even sure how many watts it is, so what lighting do you use and what kinda hood do you have? and also how big is your angelfish?

~ MyShrimpDied
 
I have the eclipse hood for the twenty gallon tank. it is like the small eclipse 3,6 and 12 systems except that it is just a hood that fits a standard 20 gallon.

it has two 18 inch(measured from the ends of the pins)bulbs in the design and a bio wheel and pump and filter box all a part of the hood.

full tank picture

profile of angel in end of tank

that doesn't show you the hood, and for those pictures I added more light to the tank so the camera's shutter speed was fast enough to not make everything all blurry.

my angelfish is on the small side at only 8 inches top to bottom on fins, body only 3inches diameter and only about 5 total length

when I got him he was almost starved to death and I didn't think he would live, so he was undernurished.

good genetics angels that are well kept from hatching can be 12 inches top to bottom and 4 inch body disc and 6 inches total length
 
That's a nice tank and a nice angel Snake…

I, likewise, just spot vacuum the surface without digging around in the substrate. Seems to work best for planted.
 
I do all my pruning, cleaning, uprooting and moving about before vaccuming, so I usually find a few spots that definitely need attention and hit those, also just a surface skim. I also try to suck up any floaters I find in the water.
 
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