"steve" wrote in message
...
Hi I have an aquarium running for 2 months now 36x14x14 inches nitrites
0.
3 adult guppies 7 baby guppies 1 Queen Pleco 5 neon tetra 3 black
tetras and
1000 snails. I change 10 litres water a week. I vacuumed the gravel a
month ago and a day later the water went greeny brown so bad I couldn't
see
the fish. I had to clear it by using greenaway. The same thing has
just
happened again after gravel vacuuming. Is it really necessary to clean
the
gravel my tank is well planted. It is fine until I clean the tank.
Also
could I keep a clown loach with the fish and size tank .

Hope you guys can help I am still learning.

Steve (UK)

Tank size is 30g us. When your water gets easily polluted by just gravel
vacuuming, then it is not balanced, and the next clue is that to have
1000 snails, you have to be feeding them. They survive off of uneaten
food, so they are becoming your main bio-load. A fish's stomach is about
the size of their eye. Feed so that no food reaches the bottom of the
tank. Give your pleco one sinking wafer and let him fight the snails for
it.

Well-planted tanks need little or no gravel vacuuming if there is a low
fish load. Note that fish-load (or bio-load) includes rotting uneaten
food and other living organisms, so your load is much higher than the
fish you see.

I'd also be curious how much of the biological filtration is being done
by your filters.

Regarding the Clown loach, nope. You would really want to have several
of them, and in a 30g, you don't have the room for even one for that
long.
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