PlanetCatfish.com

Hello-I want to know the best way to remove excess gravel from my 29 gallon tank. What would be a good procedure in doing this? My tank is completly cycled and everything is doing fine. When I bought my tank over a year ago, I was very new to the aquaria world. The salesgirl told me so many pounds of gravel to so many gallon tank. Now I have found through the internet that a 1/4 of an inch of gravel is quite sufficient. I now have a good 2 inches of gravel on the floor of my tank. I can see debri layered up against the glass. Now I know that I can vacum the gravel, but should I keep all this gravel and save disrupting the ecosystem I have now? Any advise would surely be welcome. Also, by the way my main concern is for my 4 Emerald cats and my 4 peppered cories. THANX-Bigdan

Bigdan

You do not mention what filtration you are using. If you have an undergravel systen then the amount of gravel is about right, on the otherhand if you are using other forms of filtration the depth of substrate is of little importance save for anchoring and giving plants rooting space. The danger you have at the moment is that your catfish will be unable to reach all the food particles in the gravel, which means that there will always be some that will be rotting away in the lowest areas, this is a disaster waiting to happen. I know using a gravel vacum will remove much of the uneaten food but not all of it. I don't know what size your gravel is but I would recomend the use of smooth grained sand to a depth of no more than 12 mm (1/2"). To get back to your original question , to remove the excess gravel I would use a large diameter siphon tube and just siphon out gravel with each water change untill you have reduced it to the depth you want.

Ian

Hi-I'm using a Penguin 330 bio-wheel for filtration. I don't use an undergravel filtration system. Thank you for your advice Coryman-Cheers