White Fluff

[fillthehole]

hi all

i have a fluval 205 i did a w/c last night cos ph has droped as i said in the other post. but when i started the fluval back up there where all little white fluff stuf in my tank wot is it?

 

[hollanda88]

hi all

i have a fluval 205 i did a w/c last night cos ph has droped as i said in the other post. but when i started the fluval back up there where all little white fluff stuf in my tank wot is it?

can u get a photo?

andrew

 

[gavyshake123]

i have that on the "suckers to my heater" my common pleco try to suck and eat it but dont get very far! maybe i should remove it???

 

[strangeworld2002]

Hi,

I don't think it is too much to worry about, this is a common problem with Fluval filters. With the pipes being corrogated and the actual filter not having much separation for the in/out sections of the filter some particles escape into the out pipe and get stuck in the grooves in the pipe itself. Once you prime the filter after cleaning it blasts air down the tube thus causing all of these bits to come out into the tank.

It can be annoying, especially after you have put fresh clean water into your tank. The best way to stop the particles escaping into the clean water is put a net over the end of the output head and leave it there until you are happy the filter is fully primed then remove it. Some particles will still get past the net but the larger ones that really make a mess should be caught in the net.

Hope this helps, you would think Fluval would of sorted this out by now, it really is a design fault. All other filters I have tried like Aqua one, Eheim, Tetratec all have a clear separation in the filter bucket so that the water being taken in and the water getting pumped out are not able to mix with one another, resulting in clearer water.

 

[waterdrop]

i have that on the "suckers to my heater" my common pleco try to suck and eat it but dont get very far! maybe i should remove it???

In your case gavy, what you're seeing is sure to be bacterial biofilm. Since bacteria of many types will colonize all the interior surfaces of a tank (once chlorine/chloramine is removed from the water it becomes their perfect home environment of course ) you will see these telltale signs of their colonies. They are completely harmless and actually a sign of a healthy tank getting started up. They will eventually just go away as the tank matures. There's also nothing wrong with cleaning them, but if you're doing a fishless cycle the preference is to just leave all this stuff in the name of not disturbing any of the overall bacterial startup.

Virtually all of the bacterial colonization we care about is in the filter where there is a nice flow of fresh oxygen and ammonia that encourages the bacteria to divide and grow. But at the very start of fishless cycling, there are very few of the two species you're hoping to encourage and so its wise to just let them be left alone to grow whereever they happen to stick and begin a little colony. It could very well be that a few that started out in the tank will divide and send off floaters that will get lodged in the filter and help those spots get initiated.

Anyway, just mentioning this for gavy. In fillthehole's case, we don't really know what percentage of the white fluff getting shot out of the Fluval is really pieces of biofilm or just other particles that haven't been mechanically trapped by the filter. Certainly an interesting set of info there from strangeworld.. feel like my Fluval education has been enhanced, since I've never had one myself.

~~waterdrop~~