driftwood for clown pleco
 

I keep reading that if you have a clown pleco that you should have a piece of driftwood in the tank. Is any clean piece of bark good for this?

ive seen ppl use bark you just need to clean it very good and soak it for a few days.

Make sure its not too hard (shouldn't be i guess if its bark) and obviously free from chemicals, persticides etc and you should be ok

Soak it in the tub with HOT HOT Water :twisted:

i realy dont think the temp matters.

Boil it for a while. This will 1) Extract the tannins more efficiently (that's why you use hot water for tea) and 2) kill any bugs that might be in the wood.

Also, it will drive the chlorination out of the wash water, so you won't have to wory about that either.

you should soak it for a couple of nights with an air pump underneath it to really just suck out the tannis.

Matt is actually right, the hotter the water the quicker the tannins will be released, plus its more likely to kill any nasties the hotter it is

Air pump won't make a blind bit of difference imho, doesn't 'suck' anything out of the wood, lol

Well i heard it is fine. The necesity is to boil it for about 20 minutes, pour out the water, boil it again for another 20 minutes, pour out the water, repeat until the water is only lighting stained.

I heard that someone had driftwood with not tannis problem but when he put an air pump in the tannis stained the tank.

I would definitely boil the wood thoroughly first.