Take all the hassle out of routine aquarium water changes and gravel cleaning with this awesome water change kit. Each kit includes a durable plastic gravel vacuum with an attachable hose; as well as an easy faucet connector kit for attaching your vacuum and water changer directly to your home faucet. Design is durable for years of use. Simple flow valve allows you to switch quickly from a gravel vacuum to a water changer. Special splash control helps reduce dirty water splashing in the sink. No more dragging heavy buckets throughout your house; keep it simple with the Aqueon Water Changer!
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Make sure this will fit your faucet before buying this. It doesn’t fit mine. I’ve bought numerous adaptors and none of them fit either. I even went to Aqieon’s website and e-mailed them about my problem; they never bothered to answer me.
I guess I need to go buy a faucet that fits this piecw of crap, or go back to the siphon in the bucket. I gave this 1 star only because it wouldn’t let me give it 0.
BUYER BEWARE!
When I bought this thing my first thought was how do you get the chlorine out of the water? So I called the company and was told to add the chemicals after I filled the tank and it would work right away……wrong. We have a lot of chlorine in our water down here in Miami, and it ended up killing my fish. Not only that, but as I was standing there with it hooked up to my bathroom sink, it dawned on me that all that putrid bacteria infested aquarium water was sloshing up into the same faucet we use to brush our teeth in. I now just use it as a siphon without hooking it up to the sink and am back to the buckets. Learned the hard way.
Hooking this thing up was kind of a pain, but that may have been because my bathroom faucet didn’t have the right size connection. I had to hook it up to another hose and run it all the way upstairs. It definitely leaks while the water is turned on. The pressure was weak, but that might have been due to the extra hose segment I had to install.
If you’ve got a lot of decor blocking the gravel, you’ll need to take it out. My tank has large rocks in it, and I couldn’t get the fairly large suction pipe down to hardly any of the actual gravel in my tank. I think this needs a redesign, because who wants to take everything out of their tank to use this device? I mean, go a couple extra steps further, and you might as well do a REAL cleaning.
Furthermore, it sucked out more water than it cleaned gravel. This is probably because the suction was obviously good enough to get the water out, but not good enough to actually clean the gravel efficiently. I’ll try it again when spring comes around, then I’ll be able to hook this up to the spiget outside the window near my tank. If the experience is any better, I’ll update this feedback.
I was very much looking forward to the reduced water change hassle I expected from this device, but it really didn’t deliver.
The valve assembly at the sink (as indicated by another reviewer) is very prone to leaking. This has two negative effects, the obvious one being that water sprays around the sink while you’ve got the valve at the far end turned off.
The second drawback to this poor seal is that it injects air into the line in some situations. Air and vacuum do not coexist, so I had to spend a lot of time purging air from the 25′ hose in order for the device to create adequate suction for vacuuming a tank.
For small tanks the design is somewhat more unworkable due to another shortcoming: after you’ve vacuumed the gravel in your six-gallon tank and want to refill it, what is the hose full of? Water and crud from the vacuuming you just did. If you reverse direction and fill the tank immediately, much of that crud comes right back down the hose and back into your tank. For a larger tank, the solution would be to give it a little time sucking just clear water out after vacuuming to flush the crud all the way through the hose, but on a small tank you may not have so much water left that you want to do that. This would be true of this type of design from any manufacturer.
Finally, of course, temperature control of the water after 25′ feet of host travel is error-prone. By the time you feel the result of a temperature change get to the end of the hose, you have a lot of water to flush out before your readjusted temperature makes it to the tank. Again, this would be true of this design from any manufacturer.
In the end, the Aqueon Water Changer suffers both from problems inherent in the basic design, and the poor construction of the sink assembly makes things worse.
I like this gravel vacuum. There’s no sign of leaking from the water seals. It has good flow volume and pulls the crud out of the gravel quite well. I’d say I got my value for the money. It works as advertised.