Cleaning aquariums....

Curious......any downfalls of using my shop vac to clean my aquarium? assuming everything submerged has been cleaned?

siphoning doesn't seem to get all the dirt and takes forever

Cleaning the shop vac. It could get pretty stinky pretty quickly.

Siphoning is the best way. It takes forever because you want to get the dirt without any more water than necessary. You don't want to change out more than 20% of the water at a time because it's hard on the fish. If it is taking too long or it's a large tank I would do half of the tank one week and the other half the next and rotate.

go get a Python they work great for fresh water tanks and make it quick.

http://www.pythonproducts.com/aqprod.html

http://www.pythonproducts.com/a-gws.html

My first guess would be that it would be too powerful, and remove too much water (and gravel) too quickly. Are you putting the fish into a quarantine tank when you do the cleaning? If not, you could also run the risk of inhaling your livestock!

The chore of cleaning is why I eventually gave up on my 55 gallon saltwater tank. My water quality was always pretty good (had fish that lived for years, including a clown fish that was 9 years old), but I could never get the alge completely under control. A three hour cleaning routine every couple of weeks eventually turned a hobby into a chore.

grinch77 wrote: go get a Python they work great for fresh water tanks and make it quick. http://www.pythonproducts.com/aqprod.html http://www.pythonproducts.com/a-gws.html

I totally read that as in "you-should-get-a-reptile python"

bludroptop wrote: ... but I could never get the alge completely under control.

I found that interrupting the light cycle cured the algae problem. I set my lights on timers and had them shut off for three hours in the middle of the day, no algae problems after that.

EastCoastMojo wrote: You don't want to change out more than 20% of the water at a time because it's hard on the fish.

[Butthead] uh huh huh she said "hard on" huhhuh [/Butthead]

well...these are African Chiclids.... probably some off the most die-hard fish out there....not worried about shocking them too bad. they're all 4-5 inches and very healthy

The flow rate on a shop vac is going to be orders of magnitude greater than what you should be getting with syphon/python system.

You can forget about the dirt and just do more aggressive water changes to get rid of the soluble waste. I'm not sure if there are any plants that will hold up to the appetites of the fishies you have, but that would help out too.

+1 on the siphon. I had underground filters in the last tank I maintained, and algae eaters for the algae. By not feeding too much and using good biofilters, I kept it pretty clean. You could see the fish anyway...