gravel change

[yhbae]

The owner of the LFS told me that any time you move the gravel around in a big way you risk an ammo spike, and when he goes on service calls for tanks he always pretreats the water with ammo-lock. I did'nt bother doing this, figuring any ammo being released was being sucked out with the gravel. It worked out well, and all my water tests come out good.

Now that doesn't make sense to me...

When you say "moving gravel" do they mean taking them out of the tank or just shuffling them around? During water change, gravels do get shuffled around all the time so I can't imagine I am risking ammo spike during every gravel vac...

Perhaps this is a problem on those tanks that get gravel vac'ed once a month?

 

[Tolak]

Hey there yhbae. He told me that some of the tanks he gets service calls on have been neglected as far as maintainance, and any time he has to do a really deep gravel vac on these he gets an ammo spike if he doesn't pre-treat them. He told me it's a good thing to do as a precautionary measure if you clean deeper than about 1/2-3/4" or move around a lot of gravel 'cause by disturbing deeper, dirtier gravel you are temporarily overloading the biological filtration capabilities of your system by releasing more crud than it's used to handling. It would probably make him look bad if fish started getting sick after he serviced a tank, not to mention bad for business!

Tolak

 

[yhbae]

Hey there yhbae. He told me that some of the tanks he gets service calls on have been neglected as far as maintainance, and any time he has to do a really deep gravel vac on these he gets an ammo spike if he doesn't pre-treat them. He told me it's a good thing to do as a precautionary measure if you clean deeper than about 1/2-3/4" or move around a lot of gravel 'cause by disturbing deeper, dirtier gravel you are temporarily overloading the biological filtration capabilities of your system by releasing more crud than it's used to handling. It would probably make him look bad if fish started getting sick after he serviced a tank, not to mention bad for business!

Tolak

Now that makes more sense... I wonder how often they clean up their tanks...