How do you guys deal with cloudy water?

[davidkwilson]

I’ve been dealing with cloudy water lately and was wondering what has worked for other people. I’ve been doing my regular water changes and keeping up with the filter, but it still comes and goes. Has anyone had this happen and found something that actually helped?

 

[Noroomforshoe]

It depends largely on why your water is cloudy. Iff your tank is new or if you are cleaning out the filter too much, it could be bacteria blooms. If that is not the problem try a prefilter. or maybe you need more filtration. Can you let us know more? Size and age of tank and filter., whats in the tankand filter? what do you mean when you say "keeping up with the filter" How do you clean the tank and how often? what do you feed. Can you describe the cloudiness a little more?

 

[Rusty_Shackleford]

I agree with the above statement.
There are different kinds of cloudy water. Bacterial blooms, algae, particulates, it all depends on what you're dealing with.

 

[Gnop1950]

As stated about there are a number of reasons for cloudy water. Bacterial blooms being one of the most common in established tanks. But more information would be helpful.

1. How old is the tank?
2. How often and how large are your water changes?
3. Do you have live plants?
4. What is the substrate?
5. How large is the tank and how heavily stocked?
6. What are your water parameters?
7. What kind of filtration are you using? Size, filter materials, etc.

There are lots of ways to clear cloudy water depending on the cause. With the cloudiness coming and going my "guess" would be bacterial blooms. Test Ammonia and Nitrate to see if they are elevated. Make sure you aren't overfeeding.

I've had cloudiness from time to time. You can use a flocculant like Accu Clear to help remove particles, but this doesn't address whatever the underlying problem might be. You can use UV sterilizers to address both bacterial and algae blooms. Activated carbon can help, depending on the cause of the cloudiness. I've used all of these successfully in my aquariums.

 

[Fishfur]

The few times I’ve had water cloud up other than temporarily upon startup of a new tank, my method involves a lot of water changing.

I had one tank go very cloudy & start to stink because I overfed using a bottled phytoplankton. The tank housed moina & a lot of snails and I overestimated how much they’d eat.

The moina all died, poor things, but the snails didn’t. I removed about 80% of the water, refilled, and then did that a few more times u til the tank was clear.

There were no fish to worry about and the tank remained clear after that.

Another time I had a bloom after doing a deep substrate clean - which is a very common cause for blooms. There were fish and a few shrimp but I did pretty much the same thing. Drained about 70%, refilled, repeat, I think three times. It cleared up and there were no losses of livestock that I would link to the changes.

Regular water changes alone can’t keep up with the sheer reproductive speed of the heterotrophic bacteria that are the visible reason for bacterial bloom. They double every 15 minutes or so and there are countless numbers of them.

If you choose to use water changes to try to clear things up, the changes have to be quite big and repeated often enough & close enough to each other, just to stay ahead of the bacterial reproduction.

With very sensitive, rare or expensive livestock I might not use the mass water change method but much depends on circumstances. I have been in the hobby for most of my life so there are things I might do that a less experienced hobbyist might not be willing to risk.

Another option, one that I don’t use as yet but might one day, would be to get a high quality UVC device. The good ones should clear a bloom quickly as they would kill all the bacteria in the water column that are what we see. I think you would have to do daily water changes for as many days in a row as it took once the device was installed & working, so as to remove all the newly dead bacteria - they would be a huge source of organic matter that could cause yet more problems if they aren’t removed..