Do You Occasionally Get Bad Filters?

[Alien Anna]

whoa then um ah..... do you add benificial bacteria to your tank?? Because that sometimes makes the water cloudy for a while, or you tank is full of bad bacteria or something

I suspect this post betrays a small misunderstanding about what we mean by "beneficial bacteria".

Beneficial bacteria are the bacteria that naturally occur in a cycled tank. They "eat" ammonia from fish waste and turn it into nitrite. Another species of beneficial bacteria "eat" the nitrite and turn it into nitrate - which your plants can use to grow. This bacteria largely lives in your gravel and in your filter - hence the concern with over-cleaning a filter or replacing filter innards too often.

Unless there is something very new on the market, you can't actually buy these bacteria and it wouldn't necessarily help you if you could. The bacteria need oxygen and a ready source of ammonia in order to survive, and I can't see how they could get either in a bottle! They also need to colonise your filter and gravel and grow - and that can't happen instantaneously.

I took this discussion to be about the cloudiness that comes from particulate matter in the water (detritrus from plants, solid waste etc.). If your filter isn't too good it can be like a vacuum cleaner with an over-full bag, chucking more particulate matter into the water than it sucks up!

However, some posters were concerned it could be cloudiness from bacteria over-growth. In other words, some of the beneficial bacteria had been killed off by the filter cleaning process and were having to re-establish themselves, causing a major "spike" in ammonia and nitrite levels (potentially fatal to fish) at the same time. This is known as a tank "cycling" i.e. getting the Nitrogen Cycle (that I've just explained) established.

The only way you can have a tank "full of bad bacteria" would be if you'd allowed the water to go stagnant, for instance, if your pump failed. However, the fish would probably die from lack of oxygen long before all the beneficial and neutral bacteria got killed off - bacteria is generally tougher than fish!

I hope this explains things a little better.

 

[reg2k2]

I think sometimes u can get a bacterial bloom w/out it registering in the readings (got a cloudy tank myself just a couple weeks ago)...guessing the bacteria convert it too quick.