I have been cycling for about three weeks now. With fish. Did my first water change about 4 days ago and tested my water and the nitrite levels were a little higher then they should be. I just did another water change, took about 30% of water out and replaced it with new water, and put aquarium salt. I feel that my tank doesn’t have enough gravel, especially to hold some of my plants down so I bought some new gravel. What is the safe way to put this gravel into my tank? (cleaning wise) not about hurting my fish because I will add it slowly
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Yes it’ll be fine if you add more gravel while your tank is still going through the cycle. It shouldn’t bother your fish at all, but just make sure that you wash off the gravel before you put it in because you need to wash off all the dust and other things that come in bags of gravel. Good luck! 🙂
Most people don’t realize that the entire inside of your tank is part of the biological
filtration system. This includes the inside walls of the filter/any decorations/plants
plastic or real/the inside walls(glass) and the top 1/2″ on your gravel.
It is therefor NOT recommended that you clean the glass(well as long as I’m in
there already…no) at the same time you mess/w the filter. Most filters have more
than one component(pads, bags or pads containing carbon etc) and you should
not change all at the same time.
So If you must, add the gravel over a period of a few days in spots so as not to
cover the whole bottom at once.
Is that a “salt water” aquarium ? Mollies(which are actually a brackish water fish)
are the only things that would benefit from salt. Some plants it will kill.
If it is regular gravel you need to rinse it till any cloudiness is gone but then you
need to rinse it with water that has no chlorine. Putting it into the tank with
chlorine on it will kill some of the beneficial bacteria which you are trying
to culture in there. An exception to this would be gravel which has bacteria in it
from the seller such as Eco-Complete. You waste that bacteria if you rinse this
kind. API First Layer “Pure Laterite” is good for the plants, less expensive than
Eco-Complete or Caribean Sea Flourite and did not cloudy my water but I put
it under the Eco-Complete in my tank in one and mixed them in the other tank.
Shouldn’t hurt anything, just rinse very, very well. Don’t panic if the tank gets a little cloudy, that should quickly go away. It is almost impossible to remove all the dust. The filter (and gravity) will take care of that. It shouldn’t affect your cycle at all.
Source(s): Hobbyist for many years.
you need to rinse the rocks very thoroughly to get the dust residue off of them an I think by adding them in the middle of your cycling it will just take you longer to cycle the tank..
but I don’t believe it will hurt anything.