Adding florite with fish in the tank...

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exactionfigure

Aquarium Advice Activist
Joined
Dec 20, 2005
Messages
127
Location
taunton MA
I just got my stuff today and I took out about half of the gravel I had in my 20 gallon to replace it with florite.

I risked it off before adding it to the tank but it didn't matter, my tank is now pretty much pitch black!

You cant see your hand in the tank more then 3 inches back, I have a bunch of fish in there, are they going to be ok??
 
They should be fine. It will leave a fine dust on all your plants for a while though. But nothing to worry about. I rearange my 20 alot and usually the dust clears in about a day.
 
ok, cool I was just freaking out because it was very unexpected I thought maybe it would get a little cloudy like normal gravel.
 
This makes me feel better, although I don't have any fish in my tank. I am sitting beside a large tank of brown water and it is very depressing.
 
I added flourite w/o rinsing very well, just kind of rinsed it in the bag the first time around. The water didn't clear after a week, and I had to take the whole 10 gallon tank to the sink and rinse for 1/2 hour, the amount of 'crud' that came out was amazing, after the rinse, it took about 36 hours to go from pretty cloudy to crystal clear...
 
frostby said:
I added flourite w/o rinsing very well, just kind of rinsed it in the bag the first time around. The water didn't clear after a week, and I had to take the whole 10 gallon tank to the sink and rinse for 1/2 hour, the amount of 'crud' that came out was amazing, after the rinse, it took about 36 hours to go from pretty cloudy to crystal clear...

!!!!!!!!!!!

God I really hope that's not the case I can't move my 20 gallon to the sink and besides that it's allready a well established tank.

plus my plant shipment is coming in on thursday!

it's a little more clear today...maybe a water change will speed it up?
 
And another thing is to keep an eye on how much of that crud sits in your filter as I just discovered. Everything had cleared a fair bit, and I stopped my filter to stuff some more media in there and when I started it up again, it started shooting dark brown water into my tank. 10 seconds or so probably set me back a day's worth of filtration. I've since dumped out my filter and cleaned all the flourite crap out.

I'm quite mad at flourite today.
 
The secret to clearing Fluorite dust: Filter Floss
If you have a place to keep your biological filter healthy (like another tank), put it there. Then fill your filter with floss. It will clean it out pretty quick. I can clear out one of my tanks in a few hours, depending on how bad it is.
I use it as the only filter media for a little while or the last thing the filtered water passes through by wedging it in the outflow of my AquaClears.
 
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