Gravel vacuuming is an important part of maintaining a fish tank with gravel. A gravel vacuum is essentially a siphon tube with a large diameter canister attached to one end of it. Nothing fancy, but it does the job well.
How Does Gravel Vacuuming Work?
Basically, you do this:
- Place an empty bucket on the floor near the part of the aquarium that you will be vacuuming.
- Insert the wider canister end of the siphon into the aquarium water.
- Suck on the other tube while holding it lower than the end of the tube that is in the aquarium to start the siphoning of the water. Be careful, once the water begins to siphon out, it will be flowing at a pretty good rate.
- Now, the siphoning is going. Insert the vacuum end of the siphon into the gravel, being careful not to stir the gravel.
- You could even plug the other end of the siphon to stop the siphoning if needed. This allows you to let the rock fall out of the siphon so you can move to a different spot.
- Once the bucket is nearing full, stop the siphon by plugging the other end and holding it higher than the vacuum end that is inside the tank. You can then release the water inside the tube into the tank.
Video Demonstration of Gravel Cleaning
This isn’t too hard of a process. Here’s a video from YouTube that kinda explains how this works if you have never seen it before:
