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http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/ug_jets.php

An article on another site about undergravel jets. I was wondering if anyone has first hand experience doing this. Does it keep the bottom clean as the article suggest. What problems did you discover with this setup and what was the cost of the setup. How deep of substrate do you use?
thanks.............openwater

I saw that article too, and gave it a go. I used flexible plastic tubing instead of pvc pipe because I thought it would be easier to work with, and some T-shaped join things. It only cost a couple of dollars (using the filter I already had to pump the water).

It didn't work.

The tubing didn't want to stay under the gravel. It might work better with pvc because that's rigid. When I got it to stay down, there was a problem with the water flow. It only came out of one hole. So I played around for a bit, used less outlets, took bits off where the flow was low, put more on where the flow was high. In the end I gave up.

It sounds like a good idea in theory, so maybe I just screwed it up in practice. If you try it, start with an empty tank and work on getting the flow right before you put any gravel or fish in. Be prepared to make changes to your original plan. When the pipe splits in two directions, try to make it go left and right rather than sideways and straight ahead.

Last edited by Puggle at 13-Nov-2004 19:21

This sounds an awful lot like a reverse-flow undergravel filter, except that the water is pumped over the gravel instead of through it, and of course it doesn't do any filtration.

If I really wanted to try for a totally vacuum-less tank, then I might try something like this. Put a UGF plate in the aquarium. The canister's inflow tube is placed normally; the outflow tube goes directly into the UGF, where it then goes through the gravel. Detritus in the gravel would be pushed out of the gravel and into the water, where it could be sucked up by the canister. The gravel itself would never be assumed to be part of the filtration system; the objective is just to keep it clean. Obviously this wouldn't work well with an HOB.

No, I haven't tried it, I just dreamed it up as a response to that article.