Cloudy Water Again... Grrrr

Fish are friends

Fish Crazy
Joined
Aug 23, 2010
Messages
316
Reaction score
57
Location
GB
This seems to be a recurring thing, every few days or so, I wake up in the morning and the tank is cloudy, nothing too seriously but noticeable. It clears in a day or so. I have done tests and everything is ok nitrite 0 ammonia 0, nitrate is a little high but i am due a water change.
I know this cloudyness could be bacterial bloom but i was wondering why it happens so often and how can i prevent it. Would cleaning the waste more often help? IE twice a week etc?
 
when you dop your water change do a very thorough gravel vac , remove any ornaments/wood etc check under them for uneaten food , dead fish , any waste etc .
 
Yeah once a week i do a 25 - 30% change with a thorough gravel vac (pleco doesn't like to be disturbed but hey. lol). stocking is such, 5 zebra danios, 1 leopard danio, 2 platies, 3 western rainbows and a clown pleco. Its a 90ltr tank with a fluval u2 filter, the pads are changed every 4 weeks, one at a time. (should put most of info into a sig.)
 
I agree with markandhisfish here. But remember cloudy water is not harmful too your fish but I would get it sorted out somehow as it does spoil the viewing experiences.
 
Can i ask why you replace your filter media every 4 weeks ? If it's sponges or bio ball/ceramic rings washing them in a bucket of tank water and put them back in. If it's filter carbon, remove it and replace it with sponge or ceramic rings unless you have a reason to need carbon ?
 
its only the carbon insert cartridges that i replace once every 4 weeks as per manufacturers specs. the sponges i gently shake in old tank water once every 2 mnths or when required. and clean the other bits as and when required!
 
I have the u3 and maybe change the pads once a year, once a month I think is excessive I think that fluval just want your cash m8.
 
You don't need carbon in modern fish keeping it's used by most experienced fish keepers just to remove medication from water once treatment is done. If you can fit another sponge(maybe filter floss if its after another sponge) or some bioligical media like ceramic rings i would personally.
 
You don't need carbon in modern fish keeping it's used by most experienced fish keepers just to remove medication from water once treatment is done. If you can fit another sponge(maybe filter floss if its after another sponge) or some bioligical media like ceramic rings i would personally.

+1
 
You don't need carbon in modern fish keeping it's used by most experienced fish keepers just to remove medication from water once treatment is done. If you can fit another sponge(maybe filter floss if its after another sponge) or some bioligical media like ceramic rings i would personally.

+1

+2

ditch the carbon & bung some floss or wool in there. Ta Da nice polished water :)
 
Agree with Uriel. Most of us just run ceramics, sponges and polyfloss or some combo of those and hardly ever replace any media unless it's damaged, unless we work in a small amount of fresh after a long time.

It sounds like you have good weekly gravel-clean-water-change maintenance but that that is not matched perhaps by your filter maintenance. A U2 in a 90L might need to be cleaned more often (funny, kind of opposites, less replacing, more cleaning) than two months. Instead, try increasing that to monthly, squeezing out the sponges in the just-removed tank water (as I'm sure you do now.) The bacteria are like a brown stain on media like a sponge and if you have a mature filter you will not necessarily lose too much bacteria by letting more debris get cleaned out rather than less (it's a little hard to describe.. you don't want to wring sponges out so much that it's too much but on the other hand you don't want to be so timid that you don't get the bulk of the organic debris out.

Any excess debris filled water in the filter needs to go out too and the box interior itself should get cleaned. Perhaps there is some way that a fair amount of organic debris is managing to stay within your sytstem past cleaning episodes.

If, after another year or more I suppose, you are still having problems, you might want to consider a significantly larger external cannister filter for the tank. Many of the smaller EC units are sized quite well for a 90L I believe.

~~waterdrop~~
 

Most reactions

Back
Top