Hey AD, long time. If you're so inclined, please speak on the circumstances behind involuntarily cloudy water and your recommendations for correcting the issue? Beyond muscular scheduled water changes I've been using loads of mechanical media of differing densities.
Hi Mr Overfilter. Been a while.
Lets go through my own personal battle with cloudy water.
March 2020, lockdown in UK. Get sent to work from home with no real way of doing so and not much to do if i could do it. Time on my hands to fiddle with things in the tank, start dosing ferts to try and improve the quality of my plants. At the same time my panda cory population starts to get out of hand. A few months later water starts to get a little cloudy. I really have no way of knowing which of the many things going on is causing it. Not wanting to look at the elephant in the room which is acute overstocking i start to fiddle further.
Clarifiers and carbon have little effect. Wasnt expecting it to because the cloudiness is clearly bacterial, not chemical or particulate.
Increased flow to the filter. Marginal improvement. Change some filter media to something that has better flow through. Also marginal improvement.
I then went with the nuclear option. Got a UV steriliser. A nice cheap internal steriliser. 24 hours later, crystal clear water.
https://www.aquariumkeeping.co.uk/p...PRjNGmu8JG_9VCoKH_WD5AcJtq-isxxxoCjEoQAvD_BwE
Knowing im treating the symptoms, once it was clear turned off the UV. Took a couple of months but was then at square one. UV works but is only a short/medium time fix and your issue will come back each time if the cause isnt resolved.
I take some of fishwonders advice (remember him?). Swap my water conditioner from Stesscoat to Prime. Again a marginal improvement.
Its only when i addressed the overstocking issue and started rehoming pandas to friends and family that the cloudiness started to clear up more longer term. I think im about there now, but will need to get rid of some more pandas shortly. We have had a few threads on here over the last 12 months with people looking for panda corys, and if i lived on the same continent they could have happily had a dozen or so.
Cant say whether this helps or addresses your own issue, but UV will work. You can then look at addressing the cause while at least being able to see your fish.