Do you vacuum your planted discus tank?

[moneyLaw]

Just wondering whether those of you who has planted discus tank vacuum the substrate during the water change? I am just starting up and I guess planning for the future since I plan to feed my discus at least three times a day and will do 30% WC every other day or everyday, but not sure it will be enough if I don't vacuum the substrate. Thanks.

[yikesjason]

Vacuuming is probably the most important part. Anything that is suspended in the water column will get filtered out in your filter. The in-tank build up is on the substrate.

[moneyLaw]

But I wonder for those ppl with heavily planted tank, how would they vacuum it?

[colinlp]

I think you have to make a decision, is your tank a planted tank or a Discus tank and treat it accordingly. Mine used to be a planted tank but now as you can guess it's a planted Discus tank and cleaning gets priority. Not to say you can't have discus in a planted tank but you will need to spend more time getting in-between the plants to clean. Having a good clean up crew will help too at least with uneaten food that gets lost in the plants.

[kush]

I set up my heavily-planted tank specifically for discus.

Its a 5' x 18" with three UGF plates, each with a reverse-flow powerhead and pre-filter, under the smallest-grain aquarium gravel. I left a little less than a foot unplanted on the left-hand side which is where I feed the discus. When I do my water changes, I deep-vacuum the clear area where any uneaten food (ha!) might settle and, because the reverse-flow UGF prevents the mulm from settling into the substrate, I can just sort of run the siphon tube over the rest of the tank and get most of the debris.

Large plants like red flame sword, red rubin and ozelot swords and some crypts are planted in pots buried in the gravel and the fore-ground is matted with marsilea but, mostly, the tank is heavily planted with vallisneria which grows 3" to 5" between water changes.

In addition to seven young four-to-five inch discus, the tank contains six L180 ancistrus, eight bronze tetras and a couple of ember tetras, an unknown number of pigmy corys, probably forty small kribensis because some idiot (whoops! that was me) thought it would be cool to have a pair of kribbies in there and now I can't get them out, a cloud of maybe a hundred small blonde endlers for the discus to hunt at night (they don't), twenty-something otos and I-don't-know-how-many nerite snails and rcs.

I feed five times daily, tetrabits, fbw, and live blackworms.

Point being, I change between one-third and a half of the water three times a week, on Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays and there's so much vallisneria, and its growing so fast, that nitrates are consistently in the range of 6 - 8 ppm....

55771 55772

(My only persistent issue has been low O2 levels in the morning before the lights come on - if anyone has a fix for that that doesn't involve another electrical plug, I'll kiss him/her on the lips).

6 x 55w @6700k - 2.75wpg, CO2 at 3.5bps ~20ppm, temp. 85F, pH 6.9, KH 6.

[JL15219]

I think you have to make a decision, is your tank a planted tank or a Discus tank and treat it accordingly. Mine used to be a planted tank but now as you can guess it's a planted Discus tank and cleaning gets priority. Not to say you can't have discus in a planted tank but you will need to spend more time getting in-between the plants to clean. Having a good clean up crew will help too at least with uneaten food that gets lost in the plants.

I totally agree when I first got my discus my tank was heavily planted, I would try my best to try to vacuum the substrate but it got way to difficult and time consuming....so decided to get rid of the plants for now and go BB way easier to clean...and I wanted to have nice discus instead of a nice planted tank....maybe when they are fully grown I will go back to a planted tank I do miss it.....So when I do go back I will have nice discus and nice plants :D

[Yboat]

I do 2 things

1 I take a power head and try my best to blow all the mum around so I can remove it.

2 I use a small vac( 1/2" acrylic tubing) and I work it in and around the plants. I use my thumb on the other end of the tube so I can control the flow. I do about a 1/4 of the tank a week.

[moneyLaw]

Thanks. Seems like I need to vacuum the bed... :) :) thought may be I don't need to, but the feedback is clear, need to do it.. Thanks again.

[Foxfire]

Please, no kiss but the solution I used (if you have a canister filter) is simple - on the water return pipe, just add another pipe that has small holes drilled every inch and mount this pipe horizontally a little above the water level most the length of your tank (I used two old 'water heater' suction cup mounts to hold the thing in place.) The pipe will act as a 'spray bar' as the return water falls in a series of small trickle’s and this will help aerate your tank. I used this method on my Discus breeding tank and it worked very well. Note, to prevent backup, drill a series of large holes on the top of the tube every few inches - this will allow overflow if the tube over fills. The water will still aerate.)

As for vacuuming the tank, I just leave enough space between most of my plants to make this job easy - that way, I get the best of both worlds at the cost of not having a dense growth but the tank still looks very nice and uses nitrates and Ammonia. Better still, the Discus love using the plants to break up their profile or hid behind when frightened - this reduces their stress level a great deal. Also, they like to nibble at the plants.

[wesleydnunder]

When I had my discus tank high tech and heavily planted, I didn't vaccuum the substrate at all. I feel that the mulm accumulation in the substrate provided nutrients for the root feeders. At the same time, I had a bazillion MTS in the tank as well as Amano shrimp, loaches and other types of snails so uneaten food wasn't an issue.

Mark

[Harriett]

I have a heavily planted discus tank too. I vacuum all the substrate [pool sand] down to the bottom every week everywhere I possibly can when I do my big weekly water change [75%]. I planned the tank so there would be a decent amount of room between clumps to vacuum. Where the plants have spread, preventing me from getting into the substrate [expected], I gently put the python tube down onto the base of the plants [crypts, mostly] and wiggle it--this releases most of the mulm and it floats into the tube. I work around the swords. Occasionally I pull up plants that have been in there for a while, to both trim the roots back a bit and to have at the substrate in that area. I have a full crew of cories and BN and MTS in there. I keep my discus # lower in a planted tank than the 1 discus/10g 'rule'--more like 1 to every 14-15g of water. I use prefilters and clean them regularly. If I skip vacuuming for even a week, the ditrius builds up and I feel like I am asking for a problem, LOL.
I like to change up the tank so usually about once every year or 18 months I break it down--pull all the fish and put them in a rubber maid with a filter going, pull all the plants and do serious haircuts, and do some new aquascape thing, sometimes changing the wood or adding/subtracting some of it--whatever. I vacuum the hell out of the tank, use a large spoon to move the sand around and get all the crap out of the substrate, do a couple of water changes to clear the crap completely out of there--it takes the whole weekend before it is done and the fish are all back in there, but it has a sparkling pristine cleanliness that I can't achieve from the weekly work. I am a gardener and I like to fiddle around, LOL.
Best regards,
Harriett

[zamboniMan]

I don't worry about vacuuming the substrate unless I have a big chunk of uneaten beef heart or it's just looking nasty. The plants will use any nutrients provided by uneaten food especially if the tank is heavily planted. So basically as long as it remains aesthetically pleasing then I just siphon out water and replace.

[saltydog]

I do not vacuum at all when I do my changes but in between the changes i do vacuum where i can get with an eheim battery operated submersible vacuum. That thing is pretty sweet!!! I also have lots of clean up crew like those mentioned above....MTS snails, cory cats and lots of little tetras that are pigs and eat anything the discus reject. The rest I let my plants use as nutrients.

[rich815]

I never vacuum the substrate of my planted discus tank. Could not really if I wanted to as most of my substrate has a carpet of Marsiela minuta now anyway. I do have a nice army of cories and plecos though and they are constantly stirring up any leaf matter or what not. Then the filters suck it up. I "over-filter" my 72 gal tank with a Rena XP3 and Eheim 2028 running concurrently. Also have a Koralia 1 and Koralia 2 to keep good flow going (mostly for CO2 distribution) which also keeps leaf matter and such moving around for the filters to get. In all fairness I will say I've only had discus for about a year, but they have practically doubled in size from the 3-3.5" I got them last June/July and I've had few, if any issues (occasional cloudy eye twice on two different discus, but an extra WC or two clears that right up).

[ExReefer]

I vacuum the shallow layer of pool filter sand once per week in my 75g. I purposely keep the front half of sand bed shallow and I have no foreground plants. The lack of foreground plants allows me to vaccum half the sand bed and keeps the bed clear so the discus can pick sinking pellets off the bottom. It also allows for more swimming room. This hobby has definitely shifted my intensity off plants and onto discus. I quickly realized that to keep discus in a planted tank, there needs to be more focus on the fish then the plants. This caused me to swap out my eco-complete, keep more warm water plants, and stop dosing fertilizers. The water change schedule (50% once per week) didn’t change.

Not that you asked me, but another thing I do that really helps my success is feeding clean foods and starting with high quality discus over 3.5”/4” in size. Clean foods – FDBW, CBW, pellets + discus from our sponsors. These practices cost more money, but it makes keeping discus much easier. The appetite and growth rate on some of the discus purchased from our sponsors is simply amazing. The only problems I’ve encountered with my fish were brought on by my own learning curve. The sponsor’s fish are strong from the start.

[Frankr409]

I vacuum the shallow layer of pool filter sand once per week in my 75g. I purposely keep the front half of sand bed shallow and I have no foreground plants. The lack of foreground plants allows me to vaccum half the sand bed and keeps the bed clear so the discus can pick sinking pellets off the bottom. It also allows for more swimming room. This hobby has definitely shifted my intensity off plants and onto discus. I quickly realized that to keep discus in a planted tank, there needs to be more focus on the fish then the plants. This caused me to swap out my eco-complete, keep more warm water plants, and stop dosing fertilizers. The water change schedule (50% once per week) didn’t change.

Not that you asked me, but another thing I do that really helps my success is feeding clean foods and starting with high quality discus over 3.5”/4” in size. Clean foods – FDBW, CBW, pellets + discus from our sponsors. These practices cost more money, but it makes keeping discus much easier. The appetite and growth rate on some of the discus purchased from our sponsors is simply amazing. The only problems I’ve encountered with my fish were brought on by my own learning curve. The sponsor’s fish are strong from the start.

+1

Excellent post. Often times you read "expert opinions" that something cannot be done with little or no support as to why. You have demonstrated very practical advice as to how both things can be accomplished.