Cloudy Water

[Ed Matysiak]

I bought a small Pen Plax filter the otherday and put it in my fish tank. Its a simple filter than is conected to an air pump. Within 2 days my water was cloudy and its getting worse. I think the filter is causing it. It did say on the instruction to rinse the cartridge before hand which i did. Anybody else used one of these filteres?

[davidP]

Did you have a filter in the tank before or just relied on an under-gravel one? If it's new then what you're doing is stopping the under-gravel filter from doing it's job fully but because the new filter won't have had time to build up its bacteria stock yet you've actually effectively decreased the biological filtration. What you're seeing in the water is fish waste that hasn't been cleaned up by the bacteria, but it should clear in a few days once the bacteria have colonised the new filter.

 

Once it's up and running never clean the cartridge under the tap - you need the bacteria in the filter medium and tap water will kill them.

[Ed Matysiak]

Cheers for the help david, its all working fine now and my water is crystal clear . If only i could say the same for my pond.