Today, me and my partner went to Petco because they had received two Bettas as a gift, we got two nice tanks for them plus some white aquarium gravel, and a few of their "river" stones.

Everything was fine except the gravel. We literally spent an hour hosing and rinsing the gravel, and it still had some sort of powder on it. We tested it out in one of the tanks and the water was cloudy, it almost looked like milk was poured into it. No matter what we did the gravel still made the water terrible.

We decided to leave the tank without the gravel, and just put the big river stones.

It was only 3 dollars, so I guess we got what we payed for, but why would Petco sell their gravel like that?

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It is just cheap gravel.

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Aquatic Engineer

Good thing you did'nt use it!! In time it won't even be white anymore

Try to avoid colored/painted gravel when you can (was the gravel colored, or naturally white?). It tends to dissolve easier and can actually mess with water quality and raise the pH, at least in my experience.

Though I feel compelled to say that I got gravel for all of my tanks from Petco at some point, and I've never had any problems with cloudy water...though I've never tried white gravel.

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I never had problems with gravel. I guess it was painted white... but some of the gravel just broke apart into pieces anyways. It was just terrible quality. It's my partner's first experience with tanks... so now they want to do everything natural.

Which is great because I was trying to convince them anyways... :p

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I have the black gravel from Petco. I got in in October and it is already starting to fade. I find it odd that underneath the paint, it is all kinds of weird colors. Kind of like they just took the left over gravel and put some different paint on it. Oh and my gravel did the same thing, but when I left the tank alone for a couple of days with the filter on, it cleared up. But basically, I will never buy painted Petco gravel again.

I am using Petsmart's black gravel in three of my tanks with no problems and no color change. The price is right on the 25 lb. bags too.

Petsmarts 25 pound bag of their Topfin brand is listed at $16.99 on their website but I'm sure I paid less , perhaps on sale.

ive used the petco stuff as well (dark blue, and the dark blue/light blue bags) never had an issue with cloudy as everyone said probably the paint. But i had to wash mine for a while as it seemed like i had expoxied peices of paint that just kept floating no mater how much i mixed!