cloudy water

sumoschro

Gold Thunder
Aug 16, 2003
346
0
0
41
Portland, Oregon
over the past week or so my water has gotten very cloudy, to the point where if you look from one of the long ends of the rectangular tank to the other, you can barely see the plants on the other side. I have no clue what it could be, since i just rinsed out my filter yesterday (11 - 27) and my filter is putting out just as well as the day i bought it. another thing that has happened is that my fish have become very "jerky" and skittish, along with the cloudy water. I have not overfed them, and ammonia=0 ppm, PH=6.6. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated!
:)
 
how "old" is the tank?
how big?
what's in it?
did you do anything different right before the water got cloudy?
any new objects added, etc?
have you been doing regular maintenance? (water changes, vacuuming)

you should also check nitrItes.....

usually the tank being cloudy is a cycling thing. something with the minute flora and fauna being out of balance. it's normally referred to as a bacterial bloom and is pretty normal for a cycling tank. for a tank that's been cycled it could very well indicate something has gone wrong with the cycle.

keep testing your water and do a fairly large water change, and please post whatever answers you can with any other observations you might note.
 
yeah i think the problem is that in that particular tank i dont have any plants in there, just artificial. There is no color to the cloudiness, its just kind of "whitish" for lack of a better term. I am planning on doing a water change today, and a filter change. I ran out of nitrite tests, and i need to go pick some up, so i will do that. Thanks for the help:)
 
yeah i wasnt sure what this cloudiness was, so i didn;t know whether it mattered or not. Apparently it doesn't:) . My aquarium has don efine before now, even though I havent done anything to it other than the regular stuff in the past couple of months or so. No new fish, no new filtration, or anything like that.
 
Try not feeding for a few days to see if that clears it up a bit. You may have had something happen to knock your bacterial colonies out of balance, and they need time to get caught back up. I have noticed that if I overfeed, it can sometimes cause this sort of thing to happen (either that, or the massive waterchange and filtercleaning that I do to clear out my overfeeding disasters.... it's a sad day when you're clumsy enough to drop the whole can of fish food into the tank by mistake... :/ I was dealin with spikes for a good week and a half over that.... ;P )
 
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