How Does It Work?

[Fishes33]

I have seen people, I have heard from people, they have like monster tank 500G+, just say a VERY HUGE tank or indoor pond.. and with like BIG FISHES.. that produce a HEAVY LOAD of wastes.

How can they clean up the wastes that stuck in the sand / gravel / bottom of the tank? I mean you cant really stick in one of those water changing tube in a 500G+ tank, because its tooo deep...

I heard that you can use sand filtration, heavy filtration, but how?? the poo / wastes is stuck in the bottom, how can those people get it out and clean the tank? or they just let it sit and rot?

Care to explain? ^^

 

[devlyyn]

I don't own a monster tank yet but my guess would be a bare bottom tank so that you can easily see debris to be removed combined with a power head to keep the bottom from becoming too stagnant. Either that or heavy biological filtration.

 

[deR]

You can stick a siphon down there to clean it, its not hard. Buy a Python hook it up to the hose and it will be clean in no time.

 

[Mystix212]

Usually with monster fish comes monster poo's and finally, monster filtration. By the time the poo has decintergrated and turned into a harmful substance, the filters have already produced it into nitrate.

 

[ShadowBass]

You can too siphon a large tank. You can buy siphon tubes for pythons that are like 4 ft long or more. My LFS has a really long one (not really sure why since none of their tanks are deep ).

You can use heavy filtration where most of the poop is getting sucked into the filters before it even hits the bottom. You can go barebottom where it's easy to siphon and a lot of the waste gets blown off the bottom into the filters (You can point an outflow at the bottom to keep it from becoming stagnant).
Gravel isn't a very good option in a super deep tank. It's hard to maintain and yes it will trap debris. Some people do leave waste there to rot, even though it's not real good practice. Some people also use plants to export nutrients, or denitrate systems (less common, especially in FW) so excess waste at the bottom wouldn't be as much of a concern.

That said, you're talking a 500g tank. That's really not that big. You can have 500g tanks that are no deeper than a 125g even. It depends on what dimensions you get. Indoor ponds especially are normally not that deep because people have to view the fish from the top so depth will = less visability.

Anyway, it kind of depends on what kind of setup you have. Size of tank doesn't automatically = harder to maintain. It depends on your filtration setup, substrate, dimensions, stocking levels and a lot of other things.