sunda

I have some around 15 fishes in my 25 G Tank. I have a good gravel and a power filter with some attractive plastic plants. (it's a mixture of plants with broad leaves, grass and some colored plants, but all atrificial and not the natural ones)

I used to do water changes once in 10 days and will clean my power filter once in 20 days or whenever the performance de-grades. performance what i mean here is, the water bubbles which comes at the other end of the filter is alomost stopped or have very less flow when the filter has got accumulated with good amount of waste. (this will normally happen once in 20 days)

While water change, first i used to siphon gently over the gravel so all the visible waste has been sucked out & by second, i used to stir the gravel material gently & wait for some couple of minutes to remove the minute & tiny wastes. Even after all this, when i see the water thru. the glass, i can able to observe many tiny (very tiny) water molecules, ofcourse the same wastes and the water has a sturdy look. But when i leave it as such for some time, those waste got settled at the bottom and the water has become very clear (when i switch on the light after some time the tank looks very clean) my apprehension is, i want to remove even those tiny waste materials so that water will be crystal clear. Most of the times i won't take the fishes out of the tank while cleaning and if sometime if i feel there are more dust which needs to be removed, i will take out all my pets and plants before water change.

In Precise, my queries are : Can we able to remove even those tiny waste materials so that water will be free of dust / waste.

Do i have to take fishes out of tank while water change.

If am not taking the fishes out of tank, while cleaning, won't they feel stress.

Please Advice.

sirdarksol

A couple of things.
First of all, are you changing all of your filter media at once? If you are, that may be part of the problem. Filters normally come with two types of media; one that is a bag of carbon or something that contains carbon, and another that's pretty much just a sponge. The sponge is not meant to be changed. If you don't have two different types of media in there, you should go out and buy some biological media to add to your filter. The cloudiness could be your tank going through a constant mini-cycle, where a lot of the nitrifying bacteria are being taken away, so ammonia jumps, and then the bacteria go into over-drive trying to catch up with the ammonia levels. This creates cloudiness in the water as the bacteria colony "blooms".

Another possibility is that the number of fish you have is just producing too much waste for the filter to physically suck out of the water. I don't know what blue morphs are, but I'm counting around 25" of fish (roughly) with just the barbs and the danios. I doubt this, though. I've had overstocked tanks, and they were clear. But I just wanted to put it out there as a possibility.

Those are the ideas I have right now. What are the water parameters? Those might be related.

sgould

I didn't read it as cloudy so much as stuff stirred up from the gravel during the water change. If that is correct, I doubt you are going to be able to totally eliminate it. A couple of things to maybe try to help though: First, just to get ahead you might do a couple of water changes per week for a week or two...not so much for the water change itself, but to allow you to vac the gravel really well and get more of the particles out of the tank. Another thing would be to try and get more water movement in the tank so that waste particles stay suspended in the water collumn longer before settling to the bottom. This would give your filter a better opportunity to suck some of that stuff out on a daily basis. You could accomplish this by adding a power head to the tank.

SDMatt

I've never taken my fish out of the tank while doing a water change. I don't know weather this is "by the book" or not, but IMHO I've always felt transfering the fish in and out of the tank was way more stressful on them than staying in the tank during a water change. I also always do my best to make sure the new water is close to the temperature of the tank. This also helps reduce stress.

-SDMatt

COBettaCouple

we used to take ours out when we'd clean the tank or change water when we used gravel for the substrata because of the neverending dust, but since we went to smooth flat marbles, we let them stay in and they're not stressed by it, often they get in the way being curious. lol

Butterfly

yes it would be very stressful(on the fish as well as the owner) to take them out every time a water change or gravel vacuum was done. Mine come running to see whats being stirred up that might be good to eat
Carol

sgould

Isn't that the truth! My angels hover outside the siphon as I vac and follow the debris as it makes its way up the tube, periodically "pecking" to see if they can get at it.

jsalemi

What it really sounds like is that you need a bottom feeder or two to help keep the gravel clean for you.

COBettaCouple

LOL.. sounds like our platys.. and of course, they have to nibble everything lying on the bottom after the decor & marbles are out to see if it's something to eat.

darkwolf29a

I don't take my fish out, unless I'm doing a 100% water change, or changing something MAJOR in the tank.

For example, I removed my Oscar when I changed his tank from 55 to 75 gallons. But, I left him in when I changed his substrate from sand to gravel. I was just very careful about how I put the gravel in.

sirdarksol

It would have been an impressive feat indeed if you had kept him in his tank when you changed it from a 55 to a 75