Milky water/Fish stocking advice

[PimWiz]

My 54L (14.2gallons) tank has been sitting empty for few months (exept a quide decent population of some kind of small,round and brown snails and the plants seen in the attacked photos) ,rarely doing any water changes,and i decided to remodel and clean it a bit.I took everything out and sifted the sand,tried to vaccum the water as best as i could,changed about 20l (5.2 gallons)of water,cleaned the filter and put everything back together
Now the water is slightly milky and I don't know what to do next,water parameters are as follows :

no3 : 25-50mg/l
no2 : 0
gh : 8°d
kh : 15°d
pH : \~8
Ammonia : Atm unknown

The filter i'm using is an SunSun HW 602B (1.5L canister,flow of 400 L/h) filled with about 400g of lavarock,10 leftover ceramic cylinder things and sponges
And now to get to the 2'nd question,once everything is finally stable what fish can I put in?

 

[Andy Sager]

The cloudiness is most likely from the excess cleaning. Once the biofilm and microbes adjust, that should clear up on it's own. Have you been putting any food in the tank in the past couple of months? If not, you need to know your ammonia level to know if it's safe to add fish. The main concern would be that your biological filter/ nitrifying microbes may no longer be alive. They need ammonia in order to live so if there has been no ammonia while the tank has been empty, you will need to re-cycle the tank again. The question is where is the nitrate ( NO3) coming from. You'll need to check your source water to confirm it's not coming from there. If it's not coming from your source water then it's coming from the biological filter so you'll be able to add fish ( if you have no ammonia level) but will need to add them slowly and in small quantities as the biological filter grows to handle the excess ammonia.

 

[PimWiz]

Hi! Thanks for the reply,I did an ammonia test earlier and it read 0 so for now I added 2 guppies in the tank and will continue to monitor the water.
I tested the tap water I'm using and both nitrite and nitrate are almost 0.

 

[Andy Sager]

Hi! Thanks for the reply,I did an ammonia test earlier and it read 0 so for now I added 2 guppies in the tank and will continue to monitor the water.
I tested the tap water I'm using and both nitrite and nitrate are almost 0.

Okay, that's good. That means that the nitrate is coming from the biological filter bed. Just make sure you keep an eye on the ammonia level and if you see a rise to more then .5ppm, do a water change to reduce it.