Jendayi

I'm not sure where the best place is for this topic, so please re-home it if I guessed wrong.

I have a 5 gallon tank that is cycled and home to a betta and a snail. I have a few silk plants in it, along with a little cave and the gravel. I want to update my tank decor to be more natural looking, which means changing out the purple and green gravel for something in earth tones, polished rocks or the like.

How do I go about changing out the gravel without hurting my beneficial bacteria colonies? The tank is an eclipse system with a bio-wheel that has been cycled for about 3 months now.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Carillon

Hmm ... that's a good question!

The biowheel should keep some of the bacteria going for you, I'm sure. Would it be possible to maybe change out the gravel a bit at a time? You could remove say a third or half or something, and use some kind of divider to keep the rest on one side and then add some natural gravel to the other side. Then, in a week or so when the bacteria have colonized the new gravel, you could replace the rest.

It's a plausible idea in theory, but I have a feeling it might have you picking little bits of non-natural gravel out of your new substrate for weeks/months/years/forever if the divider slips or something.

Another thing you could do would be keep a bunch of the old gravel in little clay flower pots or something to seed the new gravel ...

Good luck with this!

COBettaCouple

here's what i'd do with one of our 5g if we had gravel. (after putting your betta and snail in a safe, secure temp. home)
1) put some tank water in a bowl and put the biowheel in that.. keep it totally wet the whole time.
2) take the top filter/hood stuff off.. probably a bowl or bucket for the filter assembly.
3) put the gravel into a bucket with enough tank water to keep it wet.
4) empty out the water in the tank and clean the lower part of it.
5) put the new gravel in after you've cleaned it as much as you can for the dust.
6) put the gravel in the tank, fill it with water part way.
7) hang some gravel in the tank using the pantyhose sock method for seeding.
8) put the top part back on and the biowheel back in and start it running.

Jendayi

Wait a minute, do you write those "Some Assembly Required" manuals that come with everything these days??

Thanks Dave and Carillion, I don't know why I didn't think of the panty hose thing myself, since I have used it in another tank here lol... You should have seen the complicated process that was going on in my mind :

COBettaCouple

as long as the process didn't involve a small hamster, a squeaky wheel and a belt.