EMERGENCY.. please help soon

[kristin27]

Hey,

I've had four platies for about three weeks now, and I just cleaned the tank out for the first time tonight. (I replaced about 30% of the water.) I know I did something wrong and probably made a lot of mistakes because the tank looks dirtier now than it did before (theres all these little dusts or particles floating around in their water.)

But my biggest concern is the filter. I made the mistake of turning EVERYTHING off in order to remove the top. When I turned the Bio Wheel back on, it didnt rotate and made a strange noise. Finally I got it to rotate, but I noticed its rotating backwards. Is that how its supposed to be? I never noticed before.

Do you think my fish will be fine? Its possible I didnt leave the water conditioner in long enough before I put the new water into their tank. The reason it looks dirty is probably all the gunk that gathered up from the bottom. Does this sound very serious?
Thanks for all your time, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Kristin

 

[Guest]

no, but you might want to do another water change/gravel vac again tomorrow, but leave the filter on.

 

[mr86mister]

i must say to begin with


that is exactly what happens when you do a gravel clean, you suck up lots of gunk but the rest of it kind of gets kicked up throughout the tank and floats around for a bit

i'm looking at my bio-wheel right now and it rotates backwards...did you get the noise to stop? the filter probably had to fill up again

your fish will be fine, they will eat some of the gunk which is remaining food, it will get sucked up into the filter and or just settle to the bottom again, this will happen every time you clean the gravel so dont worry, its completely normal

next time make sure to just turn the light off and take off the hood but leave the filter and heater and bubbles etc. etc. on

 

[Menagerie]

Gunk does get kicked up during PWC, but the tank should return to normal within hours. When I do PWC, I turn off the heaters and filters. After the water is back in, I prime the filters if they need it (add water directly to the HOB filters) and turn back on the heaters.

 

[id10t]

My biowheel needs a little motivation to start turning after I do a pwc... I also refill the filter with a glass using the tank water - it seems to help.

 

[talloulou]

Yep, its normal for a tank to look dirty/cloudy right after a gravel vac. The more often you do pwc and gravel vac the less problem you will have with this. My tank is cleaned so often it only looks a tiny bit cloudy after the gravel vac and this clears in 5-10 minutes. A tank that was very dirty may take much much longer for all the kicked up mulm to resettle or get sucked up the filter. If your tank was that dirty after 3 weeks you may want to either gravel vac more often or start feeding less.

A good way to tell if you are cleaning your tank enough and/or overfeeding is to monitor your nitrates. You don't want to let you nitrates get over 40 ppm at the most, IMO.

 

[fearlessfisch]

Turn OFF the heaters during water changes unless you are certain they will stay below water level the entire time.

Important advice from someone who has exploded 3 heaters already.

 

[talloulou]

Important advice from someone who has exploded 3 heaters already.

Ohh the horror! LOL I sometimes do forget to turn off my heater but usually remember about midway through the pwc. Now that I know they can explode I will really make a more concentrated effort to remember to turn off the heater at the start. Thanks for this heads up!