Cloudy water, brown dust.

[simonblack]

I have a recently set up tank about 2mths. The tank is well planted and various bogwood. Everything seemed fine new fish were added and all levels were ok. I cleaned the filter and perform regular water changes with ro water with added minerals. I have now a very cloudy tank with what looks like floating particles in the water. There is also a large build up of some sort of algae, it looks like small brown dust on most of my plants? I have tried using the chemical to clump the particles together but this did not help. can anybody advise me what to do? Please

 

[Moe]

The cloudy water could be from overcleaning your gravel. Or doing too many things at the same time eg. water change, gravel cleaning and filter cleaning at the same time. If you overclean you get a bacteria boom which looks like tiny white particles floating around in the water. It will go away in a few days. (If it is a bacteria boom) Those water cleaners have never worked for me either.
The brown dust is some type of algae, could be brown or blue green (which often looks brown) You can get brown algae from not leaving your lights on enough, but if you have plants you've probably got the lights on for 12 hours a day. Algae can also be caused by direct sunlight or putting too much fertilizer in the tank.
Do you have any fish in the tank that will eat algae? IMO every planted tank needs some algae eating fish like otto, sae, bristlenose catfish or ammano shrimp.

 

[Changes-In-Latitude]

It's possible that your tank is experiancing an outbreak of diatoms. Perhaps there's an LFS that could help you to ID the stuff. If it is indeed diatoms the first things you want to check for are high nitrates, excess silicates, and high phosphates.
One way to control diatoms is by adding a few Atyopsis moluccensis, aka: bamboo shrimp, wood shrimp, and Singapore shrimp, to the tank.
HTH