I clean and maintain aquariums for a living. Today I visited a new customer for the first time. They have a 37 gallon tank, this is really deep, 30x12x25. It looks like two 20 longs stacked on top of each other. Poor oxygen exchange is just the beginning of this tanks problems.
It has two filters, one is an under gravel filter. It also has a Tetra Whisper 1 power filter (similar to the current PF-30).
There’s a large school of 11 black neon tetras and 12 black skirt tetras. Additionally, there is a small school of three julli cory cats. There were five originally, but two died. One black neon also died recently.
This is what prompted the call, three deaths in a week. The tank is in an advertising agency and they want it to look good…
They like the black and white theme…
The tank has a moderate amount of brown algae on the walls, artificial plants and not much on the gravel.
A slight white haze indicated a bacterial bloom.
Testing the water, I found ammonia at 0-.25 ppm, it was borderline, definitely not 0 ppm. No nitrites. The Nitrates were at 40. The thing that troubles me the most is the pH is very low. Even after a 25% water change, it still showed 6.4 at best. From the tap, it was 7.0. No surprise that I sucked enormous amounts of brown and black debris from the filter plate as I exposed a little at a time and cleaned 1/2 of it. It was the grossest thing I’ve seen/smelled in a while.
I plan on doing the other half next week, I didn’t want to do too much at once and cause a mini-cycle. I also know there’s plenty more filth down there and it will still be there after cleaning for a second time.
I want to avoid tearing down the tank and removing it. It may very well pollute the water so badly, I’d have to restart it. Obviously it would be bad for the fish… Do I clean it the best I can and let it be? This is my first plan. Perhaps with regular maintenance, the UGF will be fine.
I have customers with UGFs that are fine and would yield little debris if I cleaned the filter plate, because of very frequent water changes.
UGFs do work… if you take care of them. This one wasn’t taken care of at all.