COBettaCouple

Our tank with the platy fry in it has a filter that's giving out and needs replaced. There's no substrata in the tank since we wanted it to be easy to clean up with the crushed fry food. The tank is cycled and my question is this - how do we keep the tank cycled when we replace the filter? Since we have no substrata wouldn't almost all of the good bacteria be in the filter? Thanks.

Butterfly

Take the media out of the dying filter and put it in the new filter.
carol

COBettaCouple

I neglected (my bad) to put in my post that we will need to put a corner box or sponge filter in this tank to better suit the mahachai bettas.

Butterfly

AAHHH.. will any of the old media fit in the new filter? Could you use a sponge filter? Anyway to install the new filter before the old one goes out and let it grow some bio-bugs?
Carol

COBettaCouple

Yea, we are looking at a sponge filter and if we go back over to petco and pick one up, then we could start it running tonight in the tank. how long do you think we should run both?

COBettaCouple

Thanks for your help Carol. I actually fixed the filter and it runs fine now. <yea, i know that's shocking!> Plus after talking to the betta sp. mahachai breeder we're getting ours from, i think the way we have the filter setup now will work with them and we won't be getting a sponge filter after all.

Butterfly

Glad you were ale to fix it
Carol

COBettaCouple

Well, since we totally lost our minds at the Betta show (we'll be posting on that soon) and i wanted to be sure the mahachai didn't jump out, we went with a submersible filter for the mahachai tank. we put the substrata in last night after taking out the platy fry and let the filter run about 24 hours until we needed to put the mahachai pair in, so hopefully that at least let us not go back to square 1 with that tank. We took the 'sponge' out of it and put it in the filter of a minibow that we bought today for one of the 3 splendens we bought (without a home for ) so maybe we can at least speed up that tank on getting cycled. Your thoughts?

Butterfly

My thoughts? that you have MFS as bad as i do LOL But your plan sounds good. Just keep a watch on water parameters and you will be ahead of the game if anything starts to go wrong.
Carol

COBettaCouple

lol.. thanks, i accept that as a compliment. ..that leads me to what i was going to do as a post - will the API kit work with tannish, brackish water? or would that throw all the colors off in the tests?