How To Not Remove Water When Vacuuming.

Hi everyone.

Has anyone come up with any ingenious ways of removing pooh without syphoning water out. I was thinking of just syphoning into a bucket but with my net catching the pooh on the way in and then tipping the water back in. Will this break the pooh up into smaller particles and wash into the water anyway?

That is OK for between water changes if you really must remove the fish poo, but 50% weekly water changes are standard and it is easy enough to remove a week's worth of fish poo at the same time.

I use the eheim one, but had to cut it down to use on sand. 

Bare bottomed is not a good idea because it will stress the fish. And a bare bottomed tank will as well  It's OK for a quarantine or hospital tank as the fish aren't there very long but they need to have something below them long term. And for certain species, even a hospital/quarantine tank must have sand or gravel.
Not to mention the fact that gravel and sand are home to countless vital micro-organisms, and without either there is nowhere for these micro-organisms to live.


Do you have gravel or sand at the moment? Speaking as someone who has sand, that is as easy to keep poo free as bare bottomed. The poo, uneaten food, plant bits etc just sit on the surface as they would with a bare bottomed tank.

Bare-bottomed tanks are more common among goldfish keepers. I'm not aware of them among tropical fishkeepers. I had no option but to resort to this as my goldfish (RIP) had a habit of ingesting gravel and then sand, with adverse consequences. However, I did find that netting out the visible poo made me a bit lazier with water changes. Collectively, I suspect this impaired water quality and the lack of beneficial bacteria / micro-organisms in the substrate may have contributed to his demise.