Cleaning help

[fishyfish890]

Hi everyone haven't posted in a long time. Long story short I have a large beautiful 350L aquarium full of rainbowfish, tetras, catfish and red line torpedo barbs but to this day something still particularly bothers me - cleaning/gravel vacuuming. Weekly I do a partial water change as standard procedure but every 2 weeks I remove the plants (plastic) to clean them. Whilst all the plants are out of the aquarium I take the opportunity to do a gravel vac (I also clean underneath the rocks that remain in there). My question is simply is this necessary? To gravel vac every square inch of the substrate like I do or to prevent fish stress, should I just stick to cleaning that which is visible (i.e. not underneath the rocks)? It probably sounds like a newbie question but I'm just curious, it's a lot of work to clean a whole bunch of plants and all that substrate, then put everything back in again.

Thanks and hope you're all safe with everything going on right now.

 

[KevinZ]

I only did Vacuum Cleaning 1 Time Per Month...
So... I dont think it necessary as long as your Aquarium Is fully Established with Benefit Bacteria that will breakdown the waste on/in Gravel. There's A lot of BB on Substrate than Filter if your Tank is 4-6 Month+ Old.

 

[PheonixKingZ]

IMO, gravel vacuuming is necessary. It gets everything clean, and reducing the risk of infection/disease.

However, I don't believe vacuuming under rocks is necessary. For example, in the back of all of may tanks, I have a thick layer of Anacharis. I never vacuum back there, as I find my plants grow better with a little bit of fish poop fertilization.

I say just clean whats visible and do a good job with that.

 

[Colin_T]

If you don't have live plants, you can get away with a thin layer of gravel (1/2 inch) and it will be easier to gravel clean.

If you gravel clean part of the tank each water change it will normally keep the substrate clean. I used to do around 50-60% of the substrate each week (half one week and the other half the following week).

Cleaning the gravel does help reduce diseases and makes the tank cleaner for the fish.