Help with cloudy water in my nano tank

[BrettDS]

Well, another week, another update. Running the purigen for a week had little to no effect. The purigen got very slightly darker, but not much change in the tank cloudiness.

So, I went ahead with the water changes. I just finished and the water is definitely clearer than it's been in months. I'll give it another week and with any luck it will stay that way.

I think the remaining cloudiness in the picture is mostly on the glass. I didn't think to clean the glass before I changed the water as it didn't really look cloudy or dirty compared to the water in the tank.

 

[BrettDS]

This is kind of an older thread, but unfortunately I'm still dealing with cloudiness in this tank and I still don't know why. I changed a significant amount of water as described above and the water cleared up, but over the next few weeks the cloudiness came back. Then at the end of December my son had some major medical issues come on suddenly and my tanks took a back seat to hospitals and doctors and therapists. The tank remained very cloudy and even got worse for a while, at one point it was so bad that I couldn't even see all of the rocks through the front of the tank. Lately though, it seems to be improving slightly.

Here is a picture from this morning:

I haven't done any more major water changes since the middle of December, but it has been doing the regular automatic water changes that I described above.

I still have no idea what's causing the cloudiness, but given that it does seem to be slowly improving I'm hoping that it might eventually clear up on it's own.

I'd love to hear any other ideas to try to clear it up faster though

 

[scattered]

I hope everything turned out all right for you son.

I would have thought the GAC would do the trick. You have tried seemingly everything. I have a 13.5G AIO. I had a micro-bubble issue when the skimmer was breaking in, and again when I expoxied rock work. I keep a piece of 100 micron filter sock folded up in my second chamber along with the standard blown foam block as a mechanical filter. As well as providing pods a great home, the sock filters quite a bit of gunk. Maybe give that a shot along with GAC.

I am planning on the AutoAqua Smart AWC as an eventuality to replace my current ATO and add daily changes on a very similar schedule as yours. 1.5 cups at 16 hour intervals will be almost spot on 10% a week of my actual water volume. Do you have anything to say about the product good or bad?

 

[BrettDS]

I hope everything turned out all right for you son.

I am planning on the AutoAqua Smart AWC as an eventuality to replace my current ATO and add daily changes on a very similar schedule as yours. 1.5 cups at 16 hour intervals will be almost spot on 10% a week of my actual water volume. Do you have anything to say about the product good or bad?

Thanks. He's still working some through a lot, but things are better now than they were a few months ago.

As far as the AutoAqua goes, I really love it. I have a Neptune Apex on my big tank and obviously it doesn't compare to that, but for doing ATO and AWC for a small tank (and with a reasonably small price tag) I don't think there is anything better. It's kept my salinity very steady even with the frequent small water changes. I was a little concerned that with the small tank that I might see some salinity drift if it didn't remove and add exactly the same amount of water, but it really hasn't been a problem at all.

The only slightly annoying thing is that when it runs out of water in one of its reservoirs it has an alarm that starts sounding immediately and constantly until you refill the reservoir or shut it off. For some reason this seems to happen at about 2AM for me. Of course, if you keep an eye on the water level in the reservoir and make sure it doesn't get empty then this won't be a problem, and frankly I'm not sure there's really another good option here. Obviously you do want to be alerted when you are out of water.

The other thing to note is that originally I tried to configure it to do 1/3 of a cup every 4 hours. That worked about 90% of the time, but sometimes the alarm would randomly sound while it was emptying or filling. I tried cleaning the sensors and I was starting to think that the system was just not reliable, but then I tried doing slightly larger volumes less frequently and it became rock solid. I think it just wasn't quite precise enough for 1/3 of a cup at a time.

 

[scattered]

Thanks. He's still working some through a lot, but things are better now than they were a few months ago.

As far as the AutoAqua goes, I really love it. I have a Neptune Apex on my big tank and obviously it doesn't compare to that, but for doing ATO and AWC for a small tank (and with a reasonably small price tag) I don't think there is anything better. It's kept my salinity very steady even with the frequent small water changes. I was a little concerned that with the small tank that I might see some salinity drift if it didn't remove and add exactly the same amount of water, but it really hasn't been a problem at all.

The only slightly annoying thing is that when it runs out of water in one of its reservoirs it has an alarm that starts sounding immediately and constantly until you refill the reservoir or shut it off. For some reason this seems to happen at about 2AM for me. Of course, if you keep an eye on the water level in the reservoir and make sure it doesn't get empty then this won't be a problem, and frankly I'm not sure there's really another good option here. Obviously you do want to be alerted when you are out of water.

The other thing to note is that originally I tried to configure it to do 1/3 of a cup every 4 hours. That worked about 90% of the time, but sometimes the alarm would randomly sound while it was emptying or filling. I tried cleaning the sensors and I was starting to think that the system was just not reliable, but then I tried doing slightly larger volumes less frequently and it became rock solid. I think it just wasn't quite precise enough for 1/3 of a cup at a time.

Thanks for the great info! ATO for a little tank is a must have piece of equipment. I love the fact that my salinity stays rock solid.

I am considering auto fill for the RODI reservoir in my next home purchase but that depends if I stay here and don't move to where the water quality is better. I would still use RODI but I wouldn't need it for cooking, drinking, brushing my teeth etc. the tap here is 2-400 TDS. 200 on a good day.




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[BrettDS]

I am considering auto fill for the RODI reservoir in my next home purchase but that depends if I stay here and don't move to where the water quality is better. I would still use RODI but I wouldn't need it for cooking, drinking, brushing my teeth etc. the tap here is 2-400 TDS. 200 on a good day.

You may already know this, but it's actually not good to drink RODI water. RO water is fine to drink, but the deionizing process can take too much out of the water and it's not good for your body.

 

[scattered]

You may already know this, but it's actually not good to drink RODI water. RO water is fine to drink, but the deionizing process can take too much out of the water and it's not good for your body.

I am pretty certain that is a myth. The ions lost can easily be replenished with a healthy diet.


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[BrettDS]

Help with cloudy water in my nano tank

Well, after more than a year of dealing with this cloudy tank I think I finally have the issue resolved. As I posted above it looked like it was clearing up and I even had some hope for a little while, but then it suddenly got worse again. At this point I'm pretty well convinced that I'm dealing with some sort of bacterial bloom and I still have no idea what's feeding it, but I decided to try UV. I got a 9W UV light for $13 on amazon and stuck it in the filtration area in the back.

This is how it looked 5 days ago when I added the UV light:

And this is how it looks today:

I felt confident enough to add a few new inverts and some coral frags from my main tank.

Right now the UV light is still running 24/7, but I'll probably try to taper it down to just a few hours a day for a while to help keep things in check. Assuming it does well like that then I may try to turn it off in the hopes that the UV has kept the bacteria down enough that algae or something else will take over it's food source and keep the bacteria from blooming again.