Cloudy water

[magnamon00]

i have no idea why

 

[njparton]

i have no idea why

Well you could give us a bit more info!

Tank size, filtration, lighting, stock, plants etc etc etc

Filter wool, activated carbon, even a floculating agent can all help. So can avoiding direct sunlight, and/or too much artificial light (>10 hrs/day).

 

[Cian McLiam]

Cloudy water could, as njparton said, be any number of things, I think tho it could be a bacterial bloom, which basically happens when the toxins (for fish) build up to a level where the bacteria that live on them explode in population. This happened my fist 30L tank and stayed for around 4 weeks, no amount of water changing will cure the problem, I think there mightbe too much uneaten food and other gunk in the gravel. How often do you feed, how much and also how often do you clean the gravel?
When you do water changes, do you just scoop water from the top? this was my problem, when I finally used a gravel cleaner the amount of stuff in the water nearly made me sick!
Also be careful with flake food, a common mistake is to crush it up in your fingers before feeding, this is a definite no-no!!

Ken

 

[dvd34]

"Also be careful with flake food, a common mistake is to crush it up in your fingers before feeding, this is a definite no-no!!"

curious, why is that?

 

[Cian McLiam]

The tiny bits of food sink within 30 secs or so and remain in the gravel to decompose,giving off ammonia and other nasty stuff. The fish wont be able to eat it all and are more than capable of breaking up the larger flakes after they have soaked in water so there really is no need to do it for them. IMHO. Anybody else got a view on this??

Ken

 

[njparton]

The tiny bits of food sink within 30 secs or so and remain in the gravel to decompose,giving off ammonia and other nasty stuff. The fish wont be able to eat it all and are more than capable of breaking up the larger flakes after they have soaked in water so there really is no need to do it for them. IMHO. Anybody else got a view on this??

Ken

I take your point, but that's what I have corys, catfish and clown loaches for.

It's always best to put some bottom feeders in every tank.

 

[Cian McLiam]

True, the bottom feeders will pick up a lot of it, but some will get into the filter, under stones and plants where nobody gets to it! Far better I think to leave it in whole flakes,after all, if powder was better they would make powder food!

Ken

 

[Jo]

Also be careful with flake food, a common mistake is to crush it up in your fingers before feeding, this is a definite no-no

not sure that I completely agree on this one Ken...I started doing this so that the fry in my tank could eat the same as the adults....i find that the water doesn't cloud up and I haven't had an amonia spike cause all my fish eat what falls to the floos of the tank...they spend hours hoovering up the little bits of food...

 

[Cian McLiam]

OK, thats fair enough , but I think it misses the point slightly. This is the beginners forum,so I presume the person asking for advice is a beginner, and whats the most common mistake beginners usually make? Overfeeding. So, if you are overfeeding, and at the same time crushing the food into small particles, the chance that remaining food will build up in the gravel unnoticed is far higher than if large flakes were slowly sinking to the bottom and can be scooped out.

Feeding crushed flake to fry is fine once you know what you are doing have a cycled tank and can carry out the necessary tank maintenance, if you can get your fry to eat something that doesnt move that is! But for someone starting out with a tank that doesnt have the necessary balanced and cycled bacteria colony, the uneaten food can be disastrous as there is no filter bacteria to counteract the waste being produced. So what you end up with is a population explosion of bacteria where you dont want them, suspended in the water. I found this out the long and hard way and I wouldnt want to see somone discouraged because of the early mistakes we all have to make to become successful at keeping fish.

IMHO For a beginner, the person not to take advice from is the person who says they have never had any trouble keeping fish, they will probably be struck by a minor problem that quickly becomes a disaster because they never had the usual highs and lows the rest of us go through



Ken

 

[Cian McLiam]

Eeeek!! that last comment wasnt aimed at you Geeza!! just a sweeping, general, overblown, biased comment like I tend to make!

 

[magnamon00]

Tank size is 29 gallons, filtration is a power filter, stock is 2 baby mollys 3 mollyes 2 black 1 white and 6 black neon tetras, and i got 2 plants

 

[Juggernaut22988]

Take out the plants and add some waste control chemicals

Do a 50% percent water change (with the chemicals....) and just let is filter out the cloudiness

If that doesnt work, your lfs have chems that clear up the cloudiness
I think you have "new tank sydrome"

 

[magnamon00]

but i have had this tank for like 2 months already

 

[njparton]

but i have had this tank for like 2 months already

The same happened to me after 2-3 months. Tank nearly turn to milk.

2 things helped. Intrepet "Green Away" (even though it's white algea) and then a good quality external filter stuffed with filter gloss (wool) to remove all the clumped together particles.

Once I'd added the treatment and the filter, I had to change the gloss every 3 days for 3-4 weeks as it got clogged up with all the algea.

Now I can see through my tank lengthways - crystal clear

 

[Cian McLiam]

Hi, sorry for going on a bit but you could be running the risk of treating the symptoms and not the real problem if you go down the chemicals route. Most of the chemicals used to clear water work by clumping up particles or algae so the filter will catch them, but I still think your tank is having a bacterial bloom caused by as juggernaut said, the cycling process in the tank. The chemicals wont bind together bacteria.
Making the water clear is not the priority, so massive water changes wont work and dont treat the problem. My tank settled down from this after about 4-5 weeks but during this time, nitrite readings were sky high so I was doing something to disturb the cycling process. I think it was changing the water too often, using water that hadnt been properly aged and changing the filter media too frequently by getting finer and finer wool to try to clear it. After I gave up, it cleared itself.

Please read this web page for a discussion on how to treat cloudy water:
Cloudy water

Ken