Question about Cleaning fish tank.?

T

Trizzl3

New member
The day I was to go on vacation I did a 50% water change and vacuumed some of the fish waste out. I checked the fish stats and they were all perfect.

Later that day my mother told me that the water had gone cloudy. It's been 5 days and I'm back from my vacation. The water was clear when I got home and I continued to watch my fish and noticed my rasboras had lost there color and my male guppy was laying in the pebbles.

I checked the water stats and the nitrates and nitrites were pretty high. So I quickly did a water changed and they're all swimming again and the rasboras have their color back.

So the question is why did my water get cloudy? Why did my nitrogens shoot up? How do I prevent this?
I put out measured amounts of food so they shouldn't have been overfed.
but i won't cross it out as a possibility.
She could have over fed them.
The ammonia was at a safe level.
I'm going to do a complete tank clean out. Which I hate, but I think should be done.
 
Somebody probably overfed your fish. Maybe they thought they "looked hungry" or didn't know the right amount to feed.

That, or, it was bacterial bloom which shows up early in the cycling process. If your tank is new then t his makes sense. Otherwise I believe your fish got overfed.

Do you have a test for ammonia? The ammonia is FAR more important than the nitrate. Nitrate hardly means anything in a freshwater tank, you are only concerned with nitrites and ammonia. These two should never be over 0.25 ppm or they are causing damage to your fish already!
 
The cloudy water is from excess food that fell Between the pebbles and rotted. what you need to do is switch to sand. Also if you use flakes then you should switch to floating pebbles it's safer for your water because you can scoop out what your fish don't eat instead of allowing them to decay at the bottom.
 
Like chrissi said I also think that it was a bacterial bloom and if your tank is not new that could be the cause. Did you change your filter cartridge when you cleaned the tank. Does your filter have two of them, if it does only change one at a time so your tank always has a good amount of healthy bacteria; if not then don't change the cartridge when you do the water change, change it in between water changes. Try to do more frequent and smaller water changes like 20% instead of 50%. The reason why I say this is because when you do a big change in the tank you are taking a lot of beneficial bacteria away. From changing the water, the filter, cleaning out the filter all of these things have beneficial bacteria in them, so when you take them away new have to bloom and that's how you get cloudy water the bacteria is reestablishing itself. sorry for going on. hope this helps. by the way don,t do the whole water change just do smaller frequent changes until your fish go back to normal. Like a 10% everyday or every other day for a week =)
 
If by "complete tank clean out" you mean you're going to take the gravel out and clean it as well, don't do it! All the helpful bacteria lives in there (as well as in the filter media), and if you get rid of it, you will just make the problem worse. Just keep doing regular water changes (25% weekly is better than bigger changes less often).
 
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