Keeping Substrate Clean With Filtration?

I just added panda corys to my 40G breeder yesterday and their rooting kicked up a huge amount of the very fine decayed spiderwood that sits atop the sand, making the water pretty murky. I actually just did a water change with gravel vacuum on Monday so it's not as if I've been letting organic matter accumulate. However, my tank is planted and I have some large pieces of spiderwood that make it difficult to vacuum everywhere. I am currently running an AC 70 (as well as a water pump to add circulation). I squeezed out the filter media in tank water and ran a DIY gravel vacuum (without doing a water change) for a long time yesterday and removed a ton of the mulm and that helped a lot, but it's not entirely gone. I've heard that corys like the substrate to be very clean so I'm really hoping there's a way for me to modify the filtration and/or current in my tank to pick up more of this stuff. Furthermore, I tend to get a good amount of snail and shrimp waste accumulating. I do have a Tetra Whisper EX30 and an EX70 that I recently picked up on clearance for a VERY good price. Would adding one of those on the opposite side of the tank help suck up the particulates the corys kick up before they can resettle on the bottom? (I would swap out the media for something without carbon by the way) Thanks!

 

HI there.
Do you have fine sand or gravel?
Cory’s like soft substrate as they like to search for food using their barbs.
I have the same problem in my tank to be honest.
I just try to vacuum all the dirt up when I do water changes.
I reccomend adding length to the inlet pipe allowing the pump to pick up dirt accumulating st the bottom as most inlet pipes sit too high in the water column.

If you don’t have a finer layer of filter sponge I would reccomend getting some as it picks up micro degree that the coarse sponge cannot catch.

Work around with the outlet to create a flow that aggitates water surface and movement of water within the aquarium.

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks, it's sand, sorry if that wasn't clear enough. My filter came with an intake extender but that would make it too long. It sits several inches off the surface of the substrate and I probably don't want it much lower because I don't want to risk any sand getting sucked in. I'll look into adding some finer foam but the water coming from the outlet is clear; it just seems that a lot of the gunk never gets sucked into the filter in the first place, even when it's floating in the water column. What types of suggestions do you have for altering the output to change the amount of water movement?

 

You could add a circulation pump near the bottom of the aquarium so that the detritus can't settle on the sand.

 

You could add a circulation pump near the bottom of the aquarium so that the detritus can't settle on the sand.

Thanks, that's a good idea. I was noticing what I thought was a lot of diatoms in one area of my tank, which I assumed was from a lack of water circulation, so I moved the water pump over there last night. I noticed just now that some of the plants were now clean and I couldn't imagine that they diatoms were gone so quickly. I picked up my phoenix moss mat and shook it off and poof! It was perfectly clean because it wasn't diatoms covering everything; it was that darn driftwood dirt. I've really got to figure out a way to keep it all suspended so the filter can grab it and I'm really thinking that maybe I do need to put in a second filter on that half of the tank to suck it all up. I'd imagine that being blanketed like that is going to interfere with photosynthesis.