wait wait wait... bacteria colony?

It is my understanding that when you clean your equipment you should use aquarium water.

Read. http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=84598

Never use tap water to clean your filters contents. Filters are supposed to be dirty, it's cleaning your water.

Sorry but yes that is the wrong thing to do. When you want to clean the filter it is advised to use aquarium water that has just been removed from a water change. Otherwise the tap water will kill the bacteria on the filter.

Do not beat yourself up over it though. We all make mistakes and that is how we learn from them. If it makes you feel any better, I used to do the same thing until I knew better. Now I use tank water.The good news is this kind of bacteria grows so fast that hopefully your rinsing has not had much of an effect on your water.

Marinemom

If you have two filters running on your tank you can clean in hot tap water all you want as long as you only do one a week. You can kill of 50% of the bacteria in your tank and have them recover their numbers by the next day.

THE V said:

If you have two filters running on your tank you can clean in hot tap water all you want as long as you only do one a week. You can kill of 50% of the bacteria in your tank and have them recover their numbers by the next day.

Click to expand...

But why would you want to do that and risk a mini-cycle? You can get the same cleaning accomplished simply by gently squeezing the bio-media in a bucket of tank water.

But yeah, clean the bio-media (the ones you don't replace) in old tank water so you won't kill off all the beneficial bacteria which might cause mini-cylces and possibly another full cycle of your tank.

yeah, hate to say it but you shouldn't be doing that, I rinse all the media in my DIY filter in a 5g bucket of old tank water, it works quite well really.