HagenKB

Green Water - Cloudy Water

I need your advice regarding cloudy/green water in my tank. I have been doing my weekly 10% water changes with aqua plus tap water conditioner. How do I get a clear aquarium?

I need your advice regarding cloudy/green water in my tank. I have been doing my weekly 10% water changes with aqua plus tap water conditioner. How do I get a clear aquarium?
Cloudy water can come from two basic sources, green clouds are normally algae blooms, milky clouds are mainly bacterial blooms.

It sounds as if your problem is algal in nature, algae is a single celled plant that will "bloom" in population if the right conditions are offered. In most cases, algae will explode and turn the water very green when sunlight is allowed to strike the tank during the day. Look very carefully at your aquarium placement, is sunlight hitting the tank, is the room extremely bright? In most cases the cure is to eliminate all sunlight from the tank, most commonly this requires moving the location of the tank os that the sun never hits the aquarium.

It does take a long time for the algae to die off when they have all the factors available for growth, in some cases, the use of P-Clear in the tank will clump the algae together for easier filtration, since, as a single cell they are often too small to be trapped by common media. If you do decide to use P-Clear or some other flocculant, remove the filter material you normally use in the FLuval and replace it with filter floss, this is cheap and easily discarded when it becomes full of clumped algae. See your local pet store for help in eliminating the algae, but before you are successful, you will need to remove the main causes, too much light - if sunlight does not strike the tank, how long are you running the lights - and too much phosphate. To slow down phosphate introduction, slow down your feeding and use a low phosphate food such as NutraFin Max., In most cases, you should feed the tank once a day with as much as the fish can eat in tow minutes with nothing hitting the bottom. The bottom fish will do fine with the wastes created by the other fish, so in normal cases, they are discounted in the feeding.

By reducing food introduction, you will also tend to solve the other type of cloudy water - one where the tank looks like milk was poured into it. This is as a result of too much organic material dissolved in the water allowing bacteria in the water column to explode in population and become so dense they can be seen as a milky cloud by the naked eye.

Treatment of this is best accomplished by stopping feeding for about three days to allow the bacteria population to catch up with the excess nutrients available in the water and using them up, forcing the population to die back to normal invisibility. The same phenomenon often happens in new aquariums, where the nutrients are in the tap water used to start the tank. This is often called New Tank Syndrome, and will occur in about three days after the aquarium set-up. The same cure applies, stop feeding the tank for three days and then go back to a single feeding a day as much as the fish will eat in two minutes with everything being consumed and nothing hits the bottom to rot.

There are other helpful ways to control the problem, the use of B-Clear is a natural team of bacteria that are collected together to supercharge the decay processes of the aquarium to remove and reduce wastes to ash. This also reduces the ability of nutrients to dissolve into the water and cuts the supply of food to suspended bacteria, denying them the ability to populate to visible densities.

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