New to the hobby need help with driftwood

[Beelzebub]

Hi all

Just looking for some help, as the title says I'm new to the hobby and have recently come by a 93lt tank. As a main centrepiece for the tank I bought a large piece of driftwood.

I read up about wood before buying and the general idea would appear to be boil the wood for a day changing the water every couple of hours in order to remove the tannins.

This brings me to my problem, the piece I bought was to big to put in a pot, so I have put it in a bucket and tipped boiling water over it every night for the last 7 nights, my problem is the water just remains yellow.

2 questions,

1 - do you just keep this process up until the water is no longer yellow????
2 - if I put the wood into the tank with no sub straight /fish or plants just set up the filter and heater will that give a good idea of what the water colour wold be like or does it start yellow but settle down over time.

I would really appreciate some feedback from some one that knows.

Thanks in advance

Beelz

 

[1bigdovii]

Its fine to add to your tank now. The staining will stop over time. Carbon will also remove the stain from the water. I have driftwood in almost all my tanks and all the water is clear.

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[Owain4]

the tannins from the wont dont cause any harm at all, i only boil mine to remove eggs or any parasites. The tannins just look bad thats all. some people say the tannins are good for fish.

 

[SickSauce]

Ive never boiled My driftwood, throw em in. The Color will go away in time, no harm to fish. If its collected from wild I would boil it in case of parasites/etc

 

[Absolutely Fish]

If you soak the wood in a large container for a few days to a week and change the water as it becomes dark you can generally remove most of the tannins without boiling it. Just make sure that the water is as clear as possible before adding the wood to the aquarium. Good Luck!

 

[RUNE]

I'm going through the same thing, my driftwood is a beautiful humongous piece and will not fit into any of my pots, so every few days I do a water change and run my DE filter too, my patience is not as good as it used to be but I'm working on it. ;-)


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[David R]

Boiling will always extract more tannins than just soaking it, so even tho the water is still colouring you may be fine. Put it in your tank [assuming you haven't bought any fish yet] and leave it for a week to see what it does to the water. You can always run carbon in the filter if you don't like the look of it, but personally I'd go with it, 93L sounds like a good size for a small blackwater tank with a pair of Apistogramma and a nice school of cardinal tetras...

 

[Mount_Prion]

Don't waste your time/energy boiling it!

Tannins are your friend! As long as you know the water is clean, why bother? Eventually the color will go away, and if you have south american river type fish (and other types) they'll love it.