Water change complexity

When I do my weekly (or more) water changes I take out the driftwood, rocks, anything that can be easily removed so I can vacuum the gravel.

But most of the debris is on top of the gravel and this routine seems labor intensive. I actually left the spider wood out of two tanks because it's too much trouble to clean around.

How do people with heavily planted tanks do it? I'm wondering if maybe I could do weekly changes without all the disruption and only remove everything once every 3 weeks or so.

My 20 gallon has two Amazon swords, and stones and driftwood with rhizome type plants attached. I also have hornwort and hydrilla but I'm hoping to cut back on those (they make a mess) and put more Anubis on the driftwood. I had more dragonstone but after a few water changes I only put the small piece planted with java Fern. This tank is home to 15 neons and a snail.

The 10 is home to Patty, my female koi Betta and a snail. I remove everything but the hydrilla because it's put roots in the gravel. The other plants are attached to things and she has a cave.

Casper the combtail Betta is in a five gallon. He went from a cup to a 2.5 gallon while I prepped the 10 (Casper was the first fish) and he was happy. He never seemed happy in the 10 and wound up injuring his fins, including tearing off a pectoral fin down to a nub. Not sure how it happened, he did have a penchant for squirming under things. His fins have healed and it looks like that pectoral fin is growing back. The didn't like the first day in the five gallon but seems to be used to it now.

When I do a change I get my plastic basins and remove things. I clean the wood and rocks at the sink, gently brushing with a soft brush. I gently wipe leaves with my fingers.

Then I vacuum the gravel. I wipe the glass. Then add water and put the wood and stuff back in and top off the water.

Then I wipe up the floor, I kind of wipe as I go but there are always drops until I do the final wipe.

Y'all got my started on this, adding wood, plants, rocks . . . nobody ever talks about the maintenance.

Your tanks are awesome.

Members here often have to persuade others to do more, but here it is less! A water change can include vacuuming of the open areas of the substrate (sometimes, other times not). But there is no need to move chunks of wood, rock, etc, and in fact, anaerobic areas such as under these is beneficial to a healthy biological system. I suppose if they are disturbed every week the anaerobic issue would never arise anyway, but if you should leave these areas alone, do not suddenly disturb them down the road--this can spell death to fish.

Cleaning decor (wood, rock, whatever) is also not generally advisable. The biofilm that builds on these surfaces is important to the aquarium, and may provide food for fish, not to mentio snails and shrimp if these are present.

A regular (= once a week) substantial water change, plus rinsing/cleaning the filter media, and possibly vacuuming the open substrate--this is all you need; I would also clean the inside of the front glass (side glass up to you) as this prevents algae from forming; even if you do not see it, it is there in the biofilm and preventing is easier than dealing with it down the road. As for the substrate cleaning, I never touch the sand in my cories tank, and it is incredibly clean (they are good housekeepers!), whereas in some other tanks I might go over the top of the sand.

As I wrote in a recent post (and as Byron points out) LESS is MORE. I have sand as the substrate in my tanks, some with pool filter sand, some with play sand....that I NEVER touch. The particle size of sand is small enough so that uneaten food and plant/fish waste doesn't get down under. I do have Malaysian Trumpet Snails in some tanks and they serve as the clean up crew. When I do water changes I use a submersible pump and just remove water. As I mentioned, I never touch the sand. Now one might think that a layer of mulm would build up, but it doesn't.
Now it's often thought that gravel vacuuming is required to get the crud out. But the fact is that most of the ugly stuff that comes out with the gravel vac has already decomposed and polluted the water, so the 'dirt' that comes out is relatively inert. NOT disturbing the substrate pays huge dividends as that biology that lives there works to our advantage when not disturbed.
AND I apply the same logic to filters. Oh like most hobbyists I used to think that we need to clean the filters regularly to get the crud out of the system. But beneficial bacteria and microbes set up housekeeping in the filter media (and btw, my filters are completely filled with sponge material). Excessive cleaning just destroys their valuable process. So these days I let filters run and run until I see quite noticeable reduction in output flow...then I will clean lightly to restore flow.
Here's a deep dive into Filtration and Water Quality that readers may find useful.

I have some very old fish, so I must be doing something right. I never remove anything but mulm, and since some of the dwarf cichlids I like feed on mulm (detritivores), I leave them a little. I don't disturb plant roots, move wood, etc. I do change out 30% weekly, religiously. That has made an enormous difference in all aspects of my fishkeeping.

I have algae on rocks, just as I've seen in streams where some of our fish originate. Too clean is bad for the fish, although clean is good. There's a balance to be struck.

Thanks for the suggestions. I don't really scrub the wood very hard, and I have in addition to the biological filtration in my filter, I have a suction cup soap dish under the filter stream output that that water polishing cloth and media in it, I never clean everything at once.

I just hate rearranging stuff. I don't want it to look like someone just threw a bunch of random decor willy nilly.

The 20 with the tetras went through a terrible scourge of resistant ich, which I finally got rid of using cupramine, the lowest dose. But for awhile I was trying to keep the cysts cleaned up. Fwiw the copper didn't seem to affect the pest snails, I used the lowest therapeutic dose.

The ones left are healthy and I would like to come up with a more reasonable maintenance plan. I regularly test parameters and for whatever reason everything including nitrates is always zero. Sometimes there is a trace of nitrates. I know I'm performing the test correctly because I had the expected results during the cycling.

So now that I've had a "consultation" I'm going to put that spider wood back in and add some more plant variety.

It's hard to get a good pic of these little guys.