dditt Posted October 23, 2011 Report Share Posted October 23, 2011 (edited) Hey guys, After moving all my fish from the 4ft to my new 6ft, I did a water change and began re-scaping and preparing the 4ft for the fish that are to be moved in. Now all the media i had in the sump for the 4ft was moved across to the 6ft to speed up the cycle. So because of this i new the 4ft would need to cycle again. (brand new media has been added) My tap water is very hard and has a PH of about 8.0 so i needed to buffer the water down to about 6.7-6.8 which is what i keep all my american tanks at. I use Seachem Acid buffer for this and dose slowly (daily) because tanks are normally fully stocked. Because this tank was NOT stocked, i decided to just throw the entire dose (roughly 15grams) into the tank. Within 60 seconds, the tank clouded COMPLETELY. Visibility was reduced to less then 2cm (tank WAS crystal clear) This was all last night and this morning, there is dead bacteria everywhere in the sump and on the substrate in the tank. Tank is still cloudy but has cleared up substantially since last night Ammonia has spiked from 0.5ppm yesterday to a whopping 8.0+ppm today PH is at 6.6 So it looks like what little bacteria I had in the sump has been killed and the cycle will have to start again which is frustrating. Just wondering if anybody has come across this before? I didn't think KH adjustments would have such a large effect. Edited October 24, 2011 by dditt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bidkev Posted October 24, 2011 Report Share Posted October 24, 2011 Just like Fish need to acclimatise to PH drop, so do bacteria. I'm guessing your PH dropped too rapidly. kev Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dditt Posted October 25, 2011 Author Report Share Posted October 25, 2011 Yep, well I've definitely learned my lesson... tank has cleared up but Ammonia is still up around 5-6ppm... Oh well, forced patience can be a good thing... Looks like my big festae boy has just found him self a girlfriend and they will be going in this tank on there own instead of with the pair of GT's. This is a good lesson for others, be careful with your buffers and always be patient. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeadFishFloating Posted October 25, 2011 Report Share Posted October 25, 2011 Yep pH and temp shock are serious threats to bacteria. hence why I always advise people to clean filtration media in water taken from the aquarium the filter is running on. Using dechlorinated tapwater seems ok, but the different temp and pH can really slay a lot of the more sensative microbes. probably not anyone elses idea of a good time, but I have some great papers on bio-films. Pretty awesome how they support each other, but yea some of them are really weak to sudden change. You could try adding some seachem stability. Those microbes are what we call 'robust' almost to the point of being extremo-philes lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
D-Train Posted October 25, 2011 Report Share Posted October 25, 2011 acid buffer will create co2 as a by product. by using large doses will spike the co2 and therefore kill of the respective bacteria. so as been said already, the correct dosing, and patience is vital. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
