Cleaning a planted tank?

[Arkantex]

Hey guys, I have a 36 gallon, bowed front fish tank. In it we have 1 adult dalmation molly, 6 baby dalmation mollies, 1 adult balloon molly, 2 adult platties, 1 baby platy, 4 guppies, 3 red tetras, 1 dwarf gourami, 2 assasin snails, 1 golden apple snail, and 3 ghost shrimp. We just reciently planted some live plants in it. We have planted 2 java ferns, 3 sword plants, and 3 wisterias. They are all very small right now.

I am wondering how do I go about cleaning a planted tank? Normally with our tank I: Take out all the decor, clean the inside of the glass, use a siphon vacuum to clean the gravel, rense any algea off of the decor, put everything back in, change out approx 2/3-3/4 of the water.

How is this going to differ in a planted tank?

 

[skjl47]

Hello; I have cleaned gravel in my planted tanks in small sections. I use a clear plastic hose of enough diameter to pass the gravel thru and a five gallon bucket. I start a siphon and siphon a small section of gravel out with the water into the bucket. I do this during a regular water change. I have rinsed the gravel and put it right back in, but started keeping an amount of extra pre-cleaned gravel on hand to put back into the tank.

This sort of works. I cannot do much gravel at one time. I cannot take gravel from too close to the roots of the plants and just leave that gravel alone. Eventually the plants can grow so dense(if I am lucky) that not much gravel can be cleaned anyway. At that point i want to leave the plants alone more than i want clean gravel, so i prettyy much leave the gravel alone and enjoy the set up.

This is where my trumpet and ramshorn snails do their job. I do not remove tank decorations to clean them. the snails do a decent job of keeping algae off of them and the glass. I clean the inside glass with a magnetic algae scrapper from time to time.

The rooted plants will likely not do well if they are uprooted often enough for any sort of regular cleaning schedule.

 

[Arkantex]

OK. That is what I was wondering. I figured eventually it will get planted to where I will not be able to clean the gravel at all. I figure we will get a few more snails and some more shrimp. To take care of the substrait cleaning.

 

[Orion]

You still really need to 'vac' the bottom even with a planted tank. Best way I've found is to just hover the siphon tube above the bottom just low enough to suck up debris but not bother the substrate much. With plants the more you can leave them alone the better they are. Just watch your feeding so you don't have a lot of build up and you should be fine.

 

[Arkantex]

That sounds like a good idea. I will keep that in mind once we get the tank fully planted.
We try to keep from overfeeding and we have shrimp/snails to help out as well.

 

[lauraf]

One thing I've noticed in my tank is that debris tends to settle near or under decor. So I have a few smaller stones scattered around in between my plants, and when I do water changes, I just nudge the rocks out of the way with the hose and siphon up the collection of debris that floats up. So they are sort of like detritus magnets, or at least that's the way it seems to work in my tank.