How to Properly Gravel Vacuum a Fish Tank (Detailed Version) #aquariumcoop

today we're going to show you how to use this weapon which is a gravel vacuum for value this thing's amazing because really it's defeats a hose in this thing but i use it all the time i keep telling myself every time i use it i'm going to get slightly longer tubing and i never do for 12 years straight now what i'm going to show you today is how to start this without sucking on the end or doing anything of that craziness how to make sure we're getting the waste out of the gravel and not stirring it up inside and then also how to do it on a low tank so maybe you've got a 10 gallon or something really close to the bottom how do we do that so for the top tank i've got plenty of drop and i'm going to use this trash can now i recommend a really big bucket kind of like one of those laundry totes or something like that or uh you know maybe a tote from home depot a bucket you can be derping around cleaning and all of a sudden you're flooding your floor without realizing and this will hold 35 or 55 gallons so all right we're going to start with our edumacation up here kind of some basic principles water is going to flow down a pipe this end of it has to be lower than this end of it so we put that in the bucket right the trick is here we need the water to come out of the tank down the pipe if you just put it in like this it doesn't do anything because right here it's got all this air it doesn't do anything right you can put all the way down it doesn't do anything i will show you a trick that works but it is stupid and don't do this because it takes too much time you can put the entire dirty hose that you have in your aquarium if you've got a planted tank and all that like this is not the best thing but you can you can get all the air out of your hose right now you put your thumb on the end of the hose here you go you go oh yeah now we have a tube filled with water mostly if we put that down in our bucket now it flows magic right well let's not ruin our aquarium to do that this time poor little guys easy planter bite now uh all right so this time still the end goes in the bottom right easy you don't have to get all wet like i'm wet right now now the goal is we need to fill up the tube and the hose with water without letting air in you put this in at an angle lowering it down and right now it's still awful air because this tip hasn't gotten below the water see how fills up we're now filled up with water here we're crimped right here that's fine right when i lift this above i'm going to do this once just to because i made this video before and not everyone gets it so we want to make sure people get it if i lift this up the water that is in here is going to go down here i think we can it all went down and then we ran out right it hit air so it stopped it's not here this time so we put it down in we're filled now what's going to happen i'm going to lift it up and once the water once it starts flowing i'm going to put it back down water's flowing goes back down now i have water right let's do that again we put it back down in just like that and there's no air lift it up once the water starts going we put it back down in now we have it next tip you are going to drain your aquarium if you just talk to a camera like this or you talk to your significant other pinch your hose just like that you want to be able to have control so even though there's no water flowing right now i could talk to a customer i could talk to you guys for five minutes and do nothing and then oh i'm ready to start again yeah see so this is gonna be very useful when we're gravel vacuuming this is how i do it you got your water flowing you now put it into the bottom if i don't stop it now it's sucking up gravel look at my gravel going that's not good you pinch it you ever seen someone do this move like oh no get out of there you see how much dust is floating around right again i pinched it so i could talk so your goal is lift when the lifts when the waist separates right because i pinched it and nothing's moving we can see it right here you can actually throttle and get it super clean and not take out a lot of water your aquarium a lot of people run out of water if you never pinch right you're gonna run out of water on that 10 gallon tank you got a pinch when you move it so let me move it back we open it up we start separating it's now separated we can actually now move it on you see how much we can basically get it so that it's always going to be super brown water see there's the separation we wanted so i highly recommend we go into a corner we start one corner and it's like you're mowing a lawn start cleaning it start cleaning it right now we're clean keep it pinched move it back keep going and we're just going to make rows so you can see how you end up with little piles right kind of like when you're mowing a lawn you get lines from mowing your lawn and now you can know by the way these are the easy planters and you can see that the roots were in the substrate so they go through the bottom and it was in there and now i can move it again and right where it was waste always settles really thick under decorations so you always want to move decorations when you're doing it and you keep moving here's my last tip don't miss it when you remove this from your aquarium put your hand at the end of it right so i've got it pinched right now if i let go it siphons onto my hand it's suction cupped on here now all right so here we are in a much lower aquarium that's why i'm sitting down i've only got about a foot off the floor right now here i've got that small bucket and you can see we've done water changes and clean sponges and that kind of stuff before i've got to put this in here and i've got to have the presence of mind to not overfill it so the container has to be lower than your aquarium that just has to be all right so we're gonna get this started again now this aquarium has been neglected for a reason the fish that are in here are very rare they're wild caught from peru when we went there these guys have not spawned for me and i'm hoping with all the mom like they would have in the wild they will spawn they have not yet now these platies are in there they're just in there because they look cute so they are not wild obviously all right so now we're gonna do the same tactic to get this started it's just you know you got to go a little bit slower a lot of times so we fill it up with water it won't go as fast you see how it's going to go in slower you got more time to react so you could just normally gravel back like normal so we're gonna come down here and we're gonna suck up a bunch of sand right so with sand typically waste settles on the top right so if i come over here and i gravel vac this tank has been not gravel vac much longer than the one we just did but not that much comes off of it right the sand itself is pretty uh pretty clean so a lot of times you kind of just vacuum the top you see how it cleans itself up so yeah if you have a sand aquarium you don't need to go very deep at all just that top you know maybe quarter inch or so you know maybe you got decor right you want to clean that up a little bit now we haven't been vacuuming that long can we agree on that we have a half a bucket full already like it's real easy to forget so don't forget you don't want to ruin your carpet you don't want your spouse ruining you after you ruined the carpet let's say i'm not going to clean that sponge filter today you can vacuum it you can push into a sponge filter and vacuum it see that if i push into the side ah looks like safe the goal with a planted tank is fish poop is and mold and that kind of stuff broken down material is useful for rooted plants so things like the cryptocorns really thrive with gunk in the substrate we put root tabs also but this gunk i don't want to remove at all i'm gonna start it up again make sure i don't get my baby fish here we go water's flowing i'm going to pinch it you've got two plants right here right usually a plant will have about a six inch radius around it where it's pulling nutrients from so i'm going to show you how dirty this aquarium is right so all that poop in there is food for that plant so it comes all the way over to here right all those little hairs the little roots these little ones are actually what feed and they're called tap roots okay now i'll have to replant this later but you can see all this gunk is what they want to be eating in addition to root tabs and things like that just want to get the top layer so now we have this plant here that i have not disturbed but i've got gunk in there that i don't necessarily want you want to get just like the little top layer so you might go okay i'm going to go like a quarter inch and just remove that top layer of sludge and you do it right here so that way you're not breaking any of the roots right you go in between the plants just like i'm doing and you kind of just keep working your way through and that is how you do sand how you do planted tanks how you do tall tanks short tanks and how you keep an eye on your bucket because if i go too much longer i got poopy water on the floor and nobody likes that [Music] you

Channel: Aquarium Co-Op

Views: 4,032,643

Keywords: Aquarium Co-Op, Aquarium Co op, Aquarium Coop, gravel vacuum, gravel vacuum aquarium, gravel vacuum cleaner, gravel vacuum how to use, how to start a gravel vacuum, how to start a gravel vacuum for a fish tank, how to gravel vacuum, how to gravel vacuum a fish tank, how to gravel vac, how to use gravel vacuum, how to gravel vacuum a planted tank, aquarium maintenance, how to clean an aquarium

Id: CjNTUbUnwfY

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021