Help and opinions needed

[Babalushka]

Hiya guys, this is my first post on AA. Anyway, I used to love aquariums when I was smaller, my father used to have a gigantic 100 gallon tank with a little itty bitty goldfish and algae eater we won at the fair along with a bunch of others. Grew up to be huge suckers. Well, a few months ago I decided to pick up my own little tank. Hex 5 with a bio-wheel filter. Nice looking tank, but I'm not sure if the bio-wheel really filtered the water good at all. I got it home, got it all set up, all cycled, and I picked up a three fish, two mollies and a little algae eater. Got them in, and two days later, my water turns incredibly dirty and cloudy. I pick up some stuff from Petsmart that is supposed to remedy it, one little drop per gallon of water. Two days later, almost every fish in there is dead, except the eater. Three days after that, he's floating bottom up. So I get rid of them, wash and sanitize the tank, and start over. Re-cycled the tank, etc, and since I really liked the mollies, I got three of them, maybe I was adding too many fish at once, I'm not sure, but they lasted about three days before they all ended up dead. I felt so terrible, one of them was really cute and friendly, in a fishy type of way, he'd rub up against my finger when I was changing the water and taking samples. I was thinking about getting another tank, a little bigger probably at 20 gallons or so, with a traditional filter. Does anyone have much experience with bio-wheel filters? It just didn't seem to do the job, not to me anyway.

 

[new2betas]

When you say you cycled the tank....how long did you cycle it for? I am extremely new to this also...kind of the same deal in that I loved it as a kid. My brother and I had a sw tank that we kept at our house at the beach, but unfortunately we didn't know what we were doing and looking back on it we lost a lot and were WAY overstocked. I now have a 10g fw tank and was told by a lot of people here on the boards that for a 10g about 3-4 fish was max load. I don't know if you had too many fish in yours or maybe it wasn't completely cycled. I do know that there are some wonderful advice givers on this board...so stay put!

 

[Purrbox]

Welcome to AA!

I've got a feeling that by cycling the aquarium you are meaning that you left it empty with the equipment running. This will only test that the equipment is running properly and will not cycle the aquarium. Cycling an aquarium means that you build up a biofilter that can handle the amount of waste that your fish produce and turn it into Nitrates.

The fish that you selected really weren't appropriate for the size of the aquarium and were too much to be added all at once. They probably died as a result of Ammonia poisoning. Do you have test kits yet? You'll want to pick up liquid test kits for Ammonia, Nitrite, and Nitrate if you haven't already. These will allow you to monitor the cycle and take action as necessary, and they will allow you to troubleshoot problems once your aquarium is established.

While biowheels are probably more gimmick than function on that scale, the rest of the filter is fine in that setup. The cloudiness that you saw was probably the result of the bacteria multiplying rapidly trying to keep up with the new food source. After awhile they would have settled on the surfaces of the aquarium and the water would have cleared if the fish hadn't died first.

With the fish that you are wanting to keep, a larger aquarium would be a much better option. Larger aquariums are a lot easier to take care of as the extra water volume gives you more cushion against errors. If you can make room in your home and budget, I'd recommend going for something even larger than the 20 gallon.

 

[Babalushka]

You're absolutely right, after reading some of the posts on cycling on the forums, I found that my idea of it was not quite up to par. And now that I think about it, the top of the water was kind of grungy and weird. I'll be picking up a 20-30 gallon sometime in August. Thanks everyone for the help and advice. Can probably look forward to seeing more posts by me sometime.