So I have heard a ton of different ways to clean driftwood but I have a piece that I can't boil its about 4 feet long so I think I need to but it in the bath tub what should I do with it after I put it in there?
Its pretty hard wood and not a lot big holes or anything
Thanks
In my opinion, the great lengths we take to 'sanitize' driftwood really aren't necessary. Fish don't naturally come from laboratory environments after all.
If it were me, I'd let it dry in the hot sun for a few days. A week if I were feeling paranoid. Then let it soak for a few days if it came from the ocean (to get rid of the salt). You could even use a very dilute chlorine bleach solution if it was wet and came from a freshwater lake or stream. Just soak in a dechlorinator before adding to your tank.
If it's already completely dry, I don't think you have to much to worry about. Anything likely to cause illness to your fish is probably long dead.
Boiling forty gallons of water to sanitize a piece of wood, and then tossing it into the bacteria frappe that is a freshwater aquarium seems ... well, excessive.
+1. I don't have a beach so I can't comment, but the only thing I did was scrub it with hot water to get it clean then just poured boiling water over one side, flipped and poured again. Took about 20 minutes (I actually did like 10 pieces of wood at once). Tossed it in with the discus, after four months no deaths, I think we are fine.
Here's what I would do, put it in your bathtub, then fill with hot water from the tap. Let it sit for an hour or so, then scrub it to get any dirt or loose debris off of it. Drain the bathtub and I say you're good to go for putting it where you want. If there was anything bad in/on the wood, the hot tap water will kill it. Plus, doing this will tell you if it sinks or not. If it doesn't, well, you have some more work ahead of you.
I'm also of the opinion that boiling is a bit overkill. I think it helps to get a piece waterlogged, if the piece is small enough to fit in a pot, but I'm not too concerned about pathogens. I've soaked quite a bit of driftwood in bathtubs, mostly to try and remove salt (driftwood found on saltwater bodies). I throw it in the tub, plug the drain and run the shower until it's full. When I get up, I pull the drain plug, pile the driftwood on a mat/in a bucket, take my shower, and then throw the wood back in the tub and fill it again.
Ditto:
While there may be a reason for going overboard about sterilizing the wood, and there are many ways to do it, I have just cleaned it (scrubbed the dirt off) and soaked it until it sank. The larger pieces did not even fit in a garbage can, so I soaked one end for a week then turned it upside down to soak the other end for a few days. I still had to weight some of the pieces down in the tank.
Another way I soak wood it to throw it into my pond.
When the wood is that large, I just left it out on my driveway though a years' worth of sun and rain. (I was not ready to set up that tank for a while).
Then I weighted it down in the tank to sink.
Bleach is pretty safe, then do several water change/soakings with dechlor in the water.
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