How do you start your siphon?

echoofformless

echoofformless

Peat Advocate & Defender Of Snails
Oct 1, 2005
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Phil Uh Del Feeya
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Someone just whined that they refuse to put their mouth on a tube and inhale if I ask them to help me with my fishtanks. And I was like "I don't do that...that's what a siphon bulb is for." Her response was that she had never seen someone use something like that.

So wait, don't most people use siphon bulbs?:help:
 
You can tell that siphoning is a lost art; once you get a mouthful of gasoline, you learn not to suck too hard....


:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
 
my gravel vac didn't come with a siphon bulb so as a result i had to manually give it a pumping motion in the aquarium to get the siphon started. nowadays, i find it much faster (not to mention i don't have to create a tsunami in my tank) to just suck the end like a straw to get the siphon going. now if only my gravel vac had a siphon bulb AND a bucket clip... i don't think i would be getting a Python!
 
I just have a regular gravel vac, no siphon bulb or anything, and I don't suck on the end to start it, that is not needed. What I do is position the siphon as it needs to be, and then bob the fish tank end up and down real fast(careful to keep the end underwater). About 5-6 bobs and I am siphoning away.
 
Interesting. I just can't bear to put my mouth on the end of one my tubes. Those things have been in so many different bodies of dirty fish water....
 
For a simple siphon tube, I just roll it up into a wheel of a manageable size (like you would for an extenstion cord). Next, I turn the "wheel" on it's side and place it under water. Then, I take both free ends of the tube and point them up so all the air bubbles out. Pick an end, plug it up with your thumb and pull it out of tank, allowing the wheel to uncoil. Then, bring it below tank level into a bucket and, hooray, you have a siphon.

For a gravel vac, I just put the vac part under water, repeat the above, attaching the hose to the vac under water.
 
I just submerge my gravel vac and hose so that the entire hose fills with water. Then I put my thumb over the end of the hose, remove hose from the tank, position it in my bucket and remove my thumb...takes about 10 seconds.

have sucked a hose on occasion, but don't really put lips on the hose. put hose in hand and make tube w/ fingers and then suck on hand. unfortunately, I'm not always fast enough and one time a few years back actually gulped a mouthful of sludge when breaking down a tank. I haven't used the mouth-start method since. wouldn't have used it that time either except water level in the tank was too low to fill the hose properly and I was too lazy to walk upstairs to fill the hose w/ tapwater. I still get queasy when I think about it. I'm talking this was the really black stuff on the bottom of the tank when all the gravel has been removed. Blah!
 
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