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Hi, all. I recently set up a new tank for my yellow bellied slider and have had the tank up and running for about a week. I love my little hatchling named Rio and have found that "he" is quite the little poop machine. This is my first tank EVER and as a 20-something recently graduated from a university, I didn't expect cleaning a tank to be a difficult task... However, I am having issues when it comes to the gravel vacuum I purchased.

On the bottom of my tank, I have about medium sized river stones that have collected turtle poo and leftover food. However, when I use the small Aqueon gravel vacuum to pick these things up, it kind of spirals them in the tube chamber, collecting water, but not actually taking up the waste and into the bucket below. Is this user error? Could it be the size/power of the vacuum itself? My bucket is on the floor and my tank is on a high up dresser, so it does the actual siphoning. And like I mentioned, it certainly does a good job with water intake, just not actually picking up fish and turtle poo...

Help please!

You might want to have fewer stones (no shame in a bare bottom tank) or something like sand as a substrate. I don't know how well gravel cleaners generally work (my Python also didn't have a lot of sucking power), but there are some battery powered ones that might work for you. Or just stir up the waste and net it out.

Thanks for the feed back! Yeah, I'm going to look into maybe a sand substrate then and also try to agitate the water a bit by stirring like you mentioned. Maybe also buy a better quality siphon/gravel vacuum and see if that helps also.

Try to feed your turtle on a schedule and see if he poops right after eating. That might help a little with the cleaning too.

I took out about 50% of the stones in my tank, seeing if that would be easier instead of having to completely switch to a sand substrate and I bought a different siphon that has better suction power, and it's a big improvement! Thanks for the great advice, Steve!

Great to hear it. What brand did you get?

I'm a big proponent of bare bottom. My tank is practically bare and I never vacuum. In fact, the only thing I've used my siphon for recently is getting water out of my washing machine when it doesn't want to drain

I bought a small "Python Pro-Clean" gravel vacuum and it actually sucks up the waste with the water. $5 on Amazon. The water intake is slower also, allowing me to clean the bottom of the tank longer without accidentally doing more than a 50% water change. The Aqueon one I bought before just sucked up all the water at a very fast rate, but didn't do the actual job of taking in the waste.

Thanks for the clarification Jen.