spilt fish foood in tank

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phantomsk8er5

Aquarium Advice Regular
Joined
Jan 5, 2004
Messages
73
Location
minnesota
haha im sure this happens to many people...or maby im just dumb 8O . but i set my fish food on top of my light (with the top off) and while i was messin wit my protien skimmer i knocked the whole thing in. i scooped some out with my net but the whole tank is filled with fish food. will that mess my tank up bad?
 
yeah your in some trouble,

I would turn off all of the pumps and powerheads so that the food has a chance to settle. give it a couple of hours, then Syphon all of the food out of there and get as much as you can. then replace that water with new water. do not take out more than 40% of your current water. you may need to do small daily water changes to keep your quality high. test your parameters several times a day and watch for a spike.

what do you have in your tank?

moral of the story? never set anything on your tank ever. :)

hope everything goes well, keep us informed.
 
I did this in December. 1/2 jar of sinking pellet. It all sunk to the bottom, got brushed under the rocks in the rocks, etc. I had ammo OFF the CHART in less than 5m starting about 3 days in. I was doing 40-50% water changes on my 120. I was running 2 30g trash cans with saltwater and changing it every day. I got to the point where I pulled every single rock out of the tank and put it into a trash can with some tank water. I washed out the rock in the SW and changed out 90g of water. That was the only thing that saved my tank. The fish all survived! Didn't lose a one of them nor any of my inverts. We had a rough go of it for at least a week with the last of it being the day we pulled the rocks. Next time the rocks come out asap. I'd pull my whole tank apart today if you can. Tomorrow the latest. Otherwise you're going to see ammo off the charts by day 3 and there's nothing but water changes and pulling the rock that's going to save it. At least that was my experience.
 
Good luck. And it does happen quite often to people....a friend of mine had a 150 gallon reef, and was out running his yard sale one sunny afternoon when his 4½ year-old daughter decided that she wanted to feed the fish, and managed to dump the entire contents of a brand new 10 oz jar of flake food into his tank....it was nearly 15 minutes later when he found out....the stuff had clogged his filter intakes and had covered everything. With careful siphoning, lots of water-changes, and constant monitoring for the next week, he managed to get through the crisis with only minimal damage. Unfortunately, this was all to naught, as about 10 months later, all his fish and inverts started dying-off horribly and fairly quickly, and after running every imaginable test three times, I suggested that he had some contaminant that we could not test for and to start moving live rock to find it....his youngest daughter (about 2½ at the time) had dropped 4 metallic crayons into the back of the tank, and they were slowly melting...nontoxic to children, but apparently deadly to marine life.
 
interesting stories.

Here's mine:

My Fiancee had a goldfish tank. We came home one day to find that her little cousins had thrown some lipstick, perfume, several pens, and a clock radio in the tank.

no one died.

not even the kids. :D
 
Say it with me... fresh water! Good thing that wasn't SW!
 
I once knocked an electric clock into my freshwater cichlid tank... after I reset the breaker I found all were alive and well... except for me :) I'll never have anything above my tanks again.
 
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