Substrate And Filters

[Demm]

what's up? I've ben looking at the mbuna tank setups and I've noticed that most of them have the crushed coral substrate. I right now has the smoother stones. I really like the look of the crushed coral. I really wanna change out my rocks and put that in my tank. now my question is, how much would that effect my fish? what I was planning on doing was putting the fish in a bowl or something for a couples minutes. take about half the water out from the tank and change the rocks out then full it back up again. would I be able to do this without killing the fish or putting to much stress on them? my tank has only been up for about a week.

next question. a coworker of mine had some fish and they all died a couple days apart. the took her water to get tested and said that her ph levels were really high. prolly high 8's. but the guy at pets mart told her that it was cause she rinsed her filter. well I rinsed mine 2 days ago cause it wasn't letting water thru. was that a bad move on my part? guy said that if you wanted to rinse the filter that it should be rinsed IN the tank. her fish were just fancy goldfish by the way.

thanks

 

[CichlidAddict]

We use crushed coral more for buffering water to keep our PH up high. The nice look is a biproduct.. I would not remove the fish from the tank to change substrate, just don't dump the new coral directly on top of them when you put it in.. be careful.. You should also be aware that adding too much coral COULD raise your PH too much for the average mbuna tank. You need to use a certain amount, dependant on the size of your tank.. I don't think it would be real easy to have too much but it should be a concern..

As for your friends fish, goldfish are "cold" water fish, meaning they like the water to be 68-72 degrees. They also like a PH of 6.8-7.2 so yes PH could have been a factor. If you have only one filter on your tank you will kill the biological filter by rinsing it in chorinated water.. You should full a bucket with water from your tank and rinse it out in that water.. If you have more than one filter (with reasonable biological ability) you can alternate cleaning with tap water, just don't do them all at the same time. You might notice slight amonia spikes using this method though..


Personally, I have 4 filters all with great bio-ability and I try to clean only one at a time - sometimes I do clean 2-3 at a time if I have neglected my husbandry..

 

[Demm]

so I guess I just have to sit bck and cross my fingers and hope that my fish don't die. I only have that one filter and I washed it and kinda scrubbed all the crap off of it because it wasn't letting the water flow through it and I put it back in the tank. so far my fish haven't shown any signs of being sick or anything.

as for changing out the substrate I can just scoup out the rocks with a net or something and rinse the coral out and then put it in its place?

 

[Demm]

so now that I think about it, since I only have one filter how am I supposed to change the filter out? if I change it out won't that kill the biological filter as well? how do I go about doing that?
(i just have a regular topfin 30 gallon filter)

 

[CichlidAddict]

Thats the method I used to change my substrate...

You can buy products such as "Cycle" that I like to call biological filter in a bottle.. Its basically a small colony of bio-filter to get it kick started again.

 

[CichlidAddict]

You should add more filtration.. How many gallons is it

 

[Demm]

i'm going to get another filter for it this weekend. it's only a 29 gallon (yea i know it's small). should have my 100gallon in a month or two.

i have pics of it in my other thread on this section