Gravel cleaning without removing water

Switch to sand. Sand stays much cleaner than gravel IMO.

stuff your filters with some more media and just swirl around in the gravel all the stuff will float up and get caught by the filter then you just clean the filter.

if you have plants you don't have to vacuum the gravel hardly ever .

i tried sand, couldn't stand it. i switched to onyx sand and i loooove it. but then again i might have more money than common sense. onyx is expensive.

Plan-B,

Are you using an out of tank cannister filter? If so, I have developed a valve system that will allow you to switch the intake of your filter to a separate gravel vaccuum. Total cost from Home Depot, about $12. Let me know if you are interested, and I would be glad to send you some pics/diagrams.

TB

There are air pump operated vacuums that work good. Just hook up the airline from your air pump and clean the bag that hangs off the tube. It works nicely, and is inexpensive.

Any reason you're wanting to stay at/below 25% removal? I do weekly water changes, and if for some reason I need to do a more in-depth cleaning, I clean until I've removed half the water, refill the tank, then continue cleaning. This way the water level doesn't get low enough to stress the fish, but I still can clean as much as I need to. Changing out more water is never a bad thing.

Perhaps the wrong questions are being asked and answered here.

My questions would be - How thick is your substrate, and if thick (more than 1/2-1" deep in an unplanted tank), why is it so deep? Thinner substrates will hold far less mulm than thicker ones and be easier to maintain. Also, what is the particle size of the subtrate? Smaller particles (but larger than sand - say >2mm), will hold less mulm as the big chunks tend to stay close to or on the surface and thus are easier to remove. Particle sizes of 2-5mm are easy to vacuum. Larger, especially much larger, particles have larger spaces between and arount them, so build up debris and mulm faster as even edible food particles easily fall into inaccessible spaces, and at and above pea gravel size are difficult to vacuum. Sand is IMHO & IME a very hard to maintain substrate, so we won't talk about that here.

Personally, I find the air- or battery-powered gravel washers ineffective. They capture some large debris, little of the true mulm (fine particles).

Hey plan-B, I'm working on a gravel washer hooked up to the intake tube of my filter box. I'll post again to let you know how it goes. I've only spent $3 at lowes for the parts, minus the gravel washer of course.

This is my most favorite use of my Magnum hang on tank filter- the gravel vac attachment works very well. You can vacuum forever without removing any water. If you remove so much gunk that your cartridge clogs just change it out for a spare- takes two minutes.
It is a very cheap little filter and well worth the cost.