Why Vacuum?

[G-skrilla]

Why is it important to vacuum your aquarium?

 

[SensesFail]

Why is it important to vacuum your aquarium?

Just to pick up any unwanted debris such as fish waste and uneaten food which will in time pollute the water adding unwanted ammonia to the tank and increasing the nitrate. Keeps everything nice and clean looking and sucks it away! Always good to vacuum under ornaments every so often also! Loads of waste get trapped under things!

 

[Gvilleguy]

You'll be amazed at how much waste builds up in just one to two weeks. You can see the gunk going up the vacuum tube. And it's a lot healthier for the fish to keep the substrate vacuumed.

 

[waterdrop]

I can remember doing tanks in the old days way before gravel cleaning siphons and the substrate would get so thick with debris that it would be a horrible experience breaking a tank down after a long run. Yes, it truly is amazing how quickly and how much debris can build up and break down in the substrate.

If you think about the big picture though, I think it gives you another angle for your thoughts. The need to vacuum is another major aspect (besides the need for a filter, the need to clean that filter and the need to water change) that is an outcome of our tanks (even really large volume tanks) never really being big enough to create their own natural habitat that actually fully functions like real ecosystems do. They disparity is just too great. Natural water systems (even ones we think of as small, such as creeks) involve constant flows of water in amounts staggeringly larger than what we do in the hobby. Likewise, the oxygenation and sunlight act in much larger and more powerful ways. And the available natural filtration is also staggering (think of swamps going on for acres!) [I once spent a long spell in the Okefenokee Swamp, one of the largest areas of it's type in the world and I remember with embarrasment how, in my own naivete, I expected the swamp to stink and the water to somehow be dirty or to smell in stagnant pools or such. Instead, the water was pristine, fresh and clear. It simply looked dark either because it had lots of tannins in it or because the dark substrates were easily visible in the shallow water.]

Our little tanks and filters are just nowhere near the scale that would be necessary to create a system not needing regular intervention. Diana Walstad has done a good job describing ways we can come close, but even with purposeful effort in that direction, the limits do show themselves.

Now if what you were asking is "What are we taking out?" Then I'd have to add that besides debris, we hope that gravel siphoning will remove nitrates and probably hundreds of other inorganic and organic substances, many of which may hang with the gravel either because of their greater relative weight or because of various molecular charge attractions to other things that have weight. There is also the same "trapping" effect in gravel that happens in our filter media. There will be some water movement from our tank circulation that glances off or flows through the gravel and the gravel will indeed experience elevated debris collection, just like filter but on a much smaller scale.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Gvilleguy]

Nicely put, WD.