Cleaning Gravel

[Dennis-Pir]

Well I HAD a 20g tank or 25g one of the which tanks with fish in it, but they have all passed away =( well minus the guorami, I'm giving him to a friend... REGARDLESS my question...

I beleive I had either a break out of Ich, or a bacterial infection that wiped out all my fish. So as a result (because I am moving to a place that is around 2 hours away) I am cleaning out my fish tank, now what I am doing with the gravel is boiling it in a pot with a few tablespoons of vinegar added in it.

Will this disinefect the gravel effectively?

I am then rinsing the gravel very thourughly and packing it in a garbage bag within a rubbermaid container.

Once I get to my new place I plan on adding the gravel and cycling it for about a month.

THat is all true as long as I don't make a nano salt water tank out of the 20g.

Just wondering about the gravel though?

Thanks*GOLDFISH*

 

[Toam]

That should work far as I can figure, most bacterial problems would definitely be removed by boiling the gravel, as for the ich, in it's dormont stage it's pretty impervious to anything, but forunately has a very short life cycle, so simply leaving the gravel dry for several days would work if your removing iit from your tank entirely. Just out of curiosity, how often do you do water changes? Also, how were the fish afflicted? if it was ich, small white spots should have been visible, other symptoms mean other diseases, but the main way of keeping clear of all this is routine water changes, and maintaining your parameters.

 

[Dennis-Pir]

WEll there were small white spots all over my clown loaches and I treated it with some "anti-Ick" stuff from Petcetera which I found out from my smaller better lfs, contains stuff that ususally kills loaches lol.... well way to put that on the NOT TO DO LIST on the side of the package..... anyways....

I was doing around 20%-30% water changes once a week or every two weeks.

But I am just removing the gravel and cleaning it and boiling it with some vinegar added.... and then thoroughly rinsing the gravel.

 

[CAPSLOCK]

Yeah... a lot of medicines like to neglect to tell you that they are too strong for lots of fish, like loaches and other scaleless fish...

You can use some diluted bleach to clean the gravel also, and make sure to use some extra dechlorinated water on it afterwards (dechlorinator deactivates bleach).