hssea

just right now i was doing water change with my vaccuum and trying to move the thermometer at the same time. the thermometer hit the side of the tank and broke and then during the panic a vaccuumed up a barb. He didnt go through the narrow tube but is breathing rapidly. THe thermometer tip broke off and some of the little stones (im assuming to weight it down) went into the gravel, the tube containing the mercury did not break. I found only a piece of the glass and compared with the therm. still half the tip is missing. it might have gotten buried trying to get the other piece. i vacuumed the area hoping it would pick up the little "balls" but it wont. What should i do now, no way to get all those little balls out the blend to well with my gravel. what about the remaining glass do you think my vacuum got any tiny pieces

i scooped out the gravel in that area, still can't find anymore glass. did pull out about 20 of the little balls. Question -should i just throw away that gravel ? are those balls harmful to the fish ?

capekate

Hello Hssea
I hope that you unpluged the heater before getting your hands in the tank! One has to be so careful when dealing with a broken glass heater. What is your name brand on that heater? As far as the little balls in the heater, I thought those were mercury, but maybe not? Unless they are a heat regulator. Its a scary thought to know that there is glass left in the tank and so very harmful for you fish. There just is no protection against an accident involving rubbing up against a piece of glass stuck in the gravel. It looks as tho there is no way around a total clean out of the gravel. Some pieces of glass are just too heavy for our siphons. If it were my tank, I would be moving the fish somewhere safe and start removing everything in the tank. Keep your decorations and plants in tank water so as not to kill off any beneficial bacteria. I would take out the gravel and run it through a wire netted strainer.
You must be very careful not to cut your fingers when doing this.
I also have two glass heaters along with my newer visa-therms that I will be replacing over time myself. Its a real shame when this happens.

~ kate

luna

I don't know what those balls are made out of...but if they're lead, they NEED to come out. Lead is typically used in small metal pellets for weighing things down, though I would like to think they wouldn't put a toxic metal in something that goes in water with living things. I'd get them out just to be safe.

Do you have a quarantine tank or something you can move your fish into so you can clean that stuff out thoroughly?

hssea

it was my thermometer that broke . the balls are from the tip area (used for weighing down the thermometer. i scooped up the gravel in the area and went through it found no glass and pulled about 30 of the little balls out. im sure no glass in the gravel i scoop can i return gravel to tank if not sure if a got all the balls out

luna

Not heater, she broke her thermometer...silly Kate!

The glass warning is still valid, though.

capekate

OOOOOhhhhh jeeesh! lol..... I am soooo tired this am. Didnt get much sleep last nite, may be time for a nappy-po! haha...
OK... ignore this (me) poster on this subject! lol..

~ kate

hssea

thanks for responding . it was actually my thermometer that broke. i only have another 2.5 gallon tank. im receiving a 20 gallon but don't have it yet

capekate

HI Hssea...
lol.. I found that out when I went to the other post ... jeesh... my bad!

~ kate

hssea

thats ok . please ignore my last post(under general discussion) it was a little tricky. i guess i was a little impatient to get someone to reply. how do i delete that new thread

sirdarksol

I'll see if I can combine them (good practice for me)

Otherwise, if nobody has responded, you can usually just click on the "edit" button and then choose the "delete" option.

Edit: Done and Done.
I deleted a few extraneous messages that had no actual "meat" to them.

Drea

so if a message isn't meaty....it is cause to be deleted?

capekate

Its possible that he did that because he was merging the threads. But I agree, IMO we should not delete posts because they are not 'meaty'.

~ ka te

sirdarksol

You're right. They were posts that had to do with the fact that there were two threads, so they had absolutely no bearing at all once I merged the threads. Aside from that, there were duplicates of posts due to the fact that I was merging two threads. I wouldn't delete a pointless post unless there was some other reason to do so, as well.

COBettaCouple

Hmm.. my post got lost in the merge.

I'd 2nd Kate's advice to empty the tank and clean things out. The fish could eat the little pieces of glass or the little balls possibly.

sirdarksol

Sorry. I didn't think I had deleted any of your posts. I wonder if you were posting while I was merging them. Otherwise, I might have just accidentally selected a message of yours.

Sorry again. It was my first merged post.

Please don't make me eat fish food again.

Tavel

I'm betting the weights are made of steel. You can easily test it though, put one on the bench and hit it with hammer. If it goes flat, it's lead; it it stays relatively round, it's made of steel.

Thermometers don't contain mercury, just alcohol. And short thermometers contain an incredibly small amount, like 1ml or something so theres really no harm done if it breaks.

You'll honestly never get all of those glass pieces out. I broke a glass on my carpet and I'm still finding little shards months later...usually "finding" means pulling them out of my skin after doing sit-ups or something.

Better to just replace the gravel.

sirdarksol

The problem in aquariums is that they are closed systems, and the alcohol in a thermometer is extremely toxic, so it's not something you'd want to play with. If the inner thermometer breaks, it's best to do a massive water change and put some fresh AC in the filter.

I get what you mean about finding glass later. My wife broke a crystal bowl and then, months later, got a shard of it stuck in her foot. This happens every time she breaks something made of glass.

miker

COBettaCouple

I'm afraid it's more serious than that.. you'll need to report to Dino Claus at the North Pole base.

30yrfishguy

plz have no worries, if the balls are lead there is no danger to your fish as solid lead will leach so little into the water it will be neglidgable. its lead in chemical suspension that is dangerous! as far as the glass shards i see no problem there either. unless your sweeties wallow in the gravel they will not be harmed. changing out the gravel is not advisable as you will lose a good portion of you biological filtration, the largest area of biofiltration is actually your gravel. if you do wish to change it out do only a small section at a time, waiting a bit for that to colonize before moving on. i see no worries. gl, john

Chief_waterchanger

Everyone before me is right.

There is --probably-- very little that would happen if left like it is, but would you want to take that risk is the question you must ask yourself. If it is only a small 2.5g tank you can put the gravel on a counter top that is covered with a layer of paper towels or something and go through the gravel by hand. (Use a utensil of some sort... fork, spoon, etc.) If you see the glass good, if you don't slowly add the gravel back. Slowly adding it back means to look at each handful and see if it has anything you wanted to remove.

(Much better this happen to a 2.5g than a larger one... Imagine sifting substrate for a 200g tank or something. Now that would suck. )

hssea

thank goodness the inner thermometer didn't break. I scoop out about 4 cups of gravel in that back corner and threw it away. i wish i saved some of those balls to test if they were steel or lead. completely tearing down tank is really not an option, i have no other tank to put fish into. i think i'll go back in and remove more gravel . i think the balls and glass would fall straight down. the fish that got sucked up the vacuuum when this happened is swimming a little strange , slightly sideways.

hssea

if the balls are lead would they break down in the tank and cause harm? what a bad day!!! lesson learned don't try to do two things at the same time (ie vacuum and move thermometer)

COBettaCouple

I think they're stainless steel, but i'm not sure. Maybe it would be good to use twice the recommended dosage of Prime to treat your water with.

Tavel

not true. small doses of toxins are actually more dangerous because they don't trigger immune reactions. The water will always have higher lead, and it might be enough to cause lead poisoning in the fish, which is a product of long term exposure at low doses.

But I think they already took care of that by removing that portion of the gravel.

Also, most of the bacteria lives in the filter where it receives maximal resources. It is, for the most part, not milling around where it's being starved for food and oxygen...the gravel.

It's just the way organisms work, they'll amass in regions of plenty, and spread very thin in regions of famine.

sjlchgo

You can try using a magnet to remove the balls(if they are metal). As for the glass....I would take out the gravel from that area and sift through it out of the water or replace it completely.

Chief_waterchanger

Tavel,

The reason gravel usually has such a high concentration of good bacteria is because most people overfeed the fish in their tanks, which means tiny bits (or in some wacko cases large bits) of food lay uneatten on the surface of the substrate. (Tiny bits can even be pieces small enough that we don't see them.) The filter media does normally hold a lot of the good bacteria, but pretty much any porous surface with contact to the tank water would have good bacteria.

Tavel

ahh, makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that.

I know all surfaces hold bacteria, but I didn't realize most people do actually overfeed and flood the gravel with bits of food.

hssea

i want to thank everyone for their advise. i removed and discarded the gravel in that immediate area. the tank is 26 gall, and is a long tank so the amt of gravel shouldn't affect the bio filtration (i hope) i will keep testing the water and watching the fish. I lke the magnet idea to try to pick up any remaining balls that i might have missed. thanks everyone

oh yeah that one albino barb that got sucked up the vacuum when the thermometer broke is doing fine now

fishgirl

Even if the little balls are not steel the might not be lead but zinc made out of the same stuff that plant weights are made of. if so you would not be able to pick them up with a magnet.