Dealing with Cloudy Water in Your Reef Tank
- Feb 25, 2023
- Anshika Mishra
- 237 0 0
Cloudy water is annoying. It seems to come from nowhere, its causes are hard to identify, it looks terrible, and if it gets too bad, it can kill every living thing in your aquarium.
First up, we need to distinguish between two types of cloudy water. The first one is the fine particles like sand; if you are setting up a brand new tank with a new bag of sand, there is a 100% likelihood that you'll have cloudy water. But this type of cloudiness is super easy to fix.
A bacterial bloom causes the second type of cloudiness. This happens during a new tank's nitrogen cycle and seemingly random times in established tanks.
This is how to tell the difference between the two. If you have just added the sand or stored up your sand bed, you have the first type of cloudy water. But if your tank was cleaned yesterday and it's cloudy today, you probably have a bacterial bloom.
Getting rid of cloudy water caused by particles in water
This is common when adding new sand to a tank. In the short term, it's not damaging your livestock. The best way to eliminate it is by using the right filtration socks and changing them often.
When changing your filtration socks, have the wavemaker on and change your filter sock two to four times. Then, on the next day, clean the glass.
You may still notice some cloudiness at the bottom of the tank, but it will take a few days to disappear. If you are using sand with a water-clarifying pouch, add that as soon as you add your sand bed.
You can also use a water clarifier. It works by clustering smaller particles together so that your mechanical filtration can catch them.
Dealing with bacterial bloom
The single most significant danger associated with a bacterial bloom is suffocation. During a bacterial bloom, the white cloudiness is a heterotrophic bacteria. The same bacteria consume excess fish food, waste, and other decaying matter.
They can outcompete your fishes, inverts, and corals for limited oxygen in the tank.
Cause
The most likely cause of the bloom is a sort of organic imbalance in the tank. Maybe a day before, you vacuumed your sand bed and cleaned a who bunch of fish food and waste while at the same time disrupting the beneficial bacteria that lived in the sand bed.
The left bacteria goes into reproductive hyperdrive to consume all that freshly discovered organic material and replace the colonies you disturbed when vacuuming the sand bed.
Whatever is causing the bloom is likely caused by organic material of some kind.
Solution
Increasing surface agitation to get more oxygen and wait is the easiest way. If there is an apparent cause, like a dead fish, you should remove the fish, but mostly it's a waiting game.
The heterotrophic bacteria are there for a cause, caring for all the decaying matter. So once the underlying issue has been dealt with, the cloudiness will clear.
Just keep oxygen in the tank via a lot of surface agitation. We recommend a separate weaker pointing water's surface water and waiting for the cloudiness to disappear.
A quick remedy is also a UV sterilizer, but it wouldn't solve the underlying cause.
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