Nasty Cloudiness

Come People, I'm really shocked here,
Nobody even bother to start from the begining......
How old is the tank, do you have a filter on it,
then after you know how old the set up is, the water parameters is the next one,
and What are the catfish your talking about?
Gottta know these things before you can start to give solutions on how to fix what you don;t know is broke.

50% w/c twice a day on a new tank IMHO, is to much......10% a day maybe......but not 50 twice, it wouldn;t get a chance to get the bateria started in the right direction.
Just my 2 cents worth.
 
Mr. Aquarium is right on with a request to know the facts before solutions are posted.

Just an observation…is that a live potted plant in the back corner? Is it still wrapped in the original media? Potted plant media is loaded with nutrients, including urea, that will play havoc on your water column including inducing algae blooms.
 
Alrighty, lets start at beginning... about 3 months ago I moved my fishes from older 10 gal tank to new 10 gal tank keeping 50% old water and added 50% new water so its like doing water changes. I needed to reseal the old tank so thats why the move took place.
3 months later, this happened. Also there only thing I recently changed was the pH chemical I decided that I wanted to try to use pH Neutral Regulator... its basically a buffer that would keep pH at 7.

As for the cat fishes, 1 is called Stony Catfish, I haven't been able to find the species name yet, its really small and neat looking, it has long fins that looks like sort of a stick. Other 2 cat fishes are Net Cory (Corydoras reticulatus). I've been planning on getting a bigger tank like 20g or 30g, 10g is toooo limited for what I wanted ;-) So I'll just have few fishes in 10g until then.

Ah as for the plant... ehhhhhh I brought the plant in less than 3 months ago like 2 or 1 month ago and it still has the pot along with it that I got from petsmart. Not good? I haven't had any problems with algae blooms anyway. I liked having the pots cause it keeps the plants in place when I had a pleco that died a while ago after I moved the fishes from 1 tank to another tank. Won't be getting a pleco cause most of them will outgrow 10g.

Now as for water changes I only have done total of 50% water changes in 3 or 4 days. Its still cloudy, I'm not too sure if I should attempt some more water changes. I could see some sort of bubbles forming on top of tank along the edges. And some sort of slime/coating on top?

Thanks for your wonderful help, let me know if you need more info.
 
Most of your bacteria will be building up in the filter media, not the water, so if there are high levels of nitrites and amonia water changes are a must to help get rid of them. Usually 10% will not put a dent in the numbers really.
Also, Jinx, what exactly did you mean by adding chemicals to the water? I know in the other post you mentioned it was to change the ph... are you adding anything besides that? More often than not changing the ph will only cause you more problems and the fish will probably be able to adapt to whatever the ph normally is. Can you post what your nitrite and ph levels are? If you don't have a test kit, you'll really want to pick those two up (and the amonia one, but it sounds like you already have that). If you don't have the test kits yet, most fish stores will test for free if you take them a water sample, just make sure that you write down the exact numbers that they give you, don't just let them tell you that its "good or bad"!!!
 
The test kits i have are ammonia, cholrine/chloramine (don't use this one too much), and this 5 tester in one strip: nitrate, nitrite, hardness, alkalinity, and pH. Thats the type of kit I've been using for a year and half. I've been thinking about trying to use different kit after this one runs out, not sure if its necessary.

I'll take the tests now I haven't checked for past 2 days.
Chlorine: no problem as always thanks to stress zyme.
Ammonia: Still off charts. 6.0 ppm :help: I've been nsuing ammo lock so it seem its protecting the fishes from being harmed by the ammonia because I can see them swimming around here and there.
Nitrate: 30ppm
Nitrite: 3.0ppm Great now nitrate/nitrites are spking.. I expected that.
Hardness: 300ppm real hard.
Alkalinity: 0ppm (omg, never happened before)
pH: probably around 6.9- 6.8

Pthh, the tests doesn't make me happy.
 
Are you doing gravel vacs? Also I think the tank would benefit from some additional low light plants. Don't know how new the sword on the left is, but it seems to be doing well. Add more and take them out of the pots and let the roots get in the gravel.
 
Gambusia said:
Use Amquel plus to bring down the ammonia.
Click to expand...

Whats wrong with Ammo-Lock? whats the difference huh?

In response to Aveon, I'm doing gravel vac when i'm doing water changes. I suppose I need to do some 10% change since I didn't do any yesterday. I didn't want to over do the waterchanges and don't give the bacteria time to settle in.
 
You'll actually want to do a large water change, at least 50%, to try and get the nitrite down to 0, or as low as you can. That can be as toxic to the fish as amonia. As for the ph, I would not try to alter it any. Really anything from 6 to 8 most fish can adapt to.
 
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