Pet Forum / Aquaria / Cichlids / June 2004

interspersed...

I'm tempted to let someone else reply, as I'm just one opinion in a sea
of experience, but as you can ignore my comments..I'll blather on...

I never bleach tanks.  I bleach dip stuff (1 part bleach in 20 parts
water in a 5g pail, followed by rinsing under water, and final rinse in
another 5g pail with 10x de-chlor).  Fine leaved plants get 5-10 seconds.
Coarse leaved get up to a minute.  Silk, plastic and rockwork, overnight.
Porous rocks and driftwood don't get bleached, they get scrubbed and
shelved for a few months, or boiled.  Gravel gets thrown out, or hot
water rinse and spread out on a plastic tarp over the lawn on a sunny day
to dry, and then goes into storage until I need it again.

An empty glass box is not hard to sterilize (none of the surfaces are
porous).  Empty the tank, rinse and clean glass as you are draining.  Let
it dry out (I pour a bit of salt into that last remaining cm of water to
more quickly kill any spores at the bottom).  Refill with hot water (this
is a delicate procedure, details below).  Let soak a couple of hours.
Empty and let dry again.  You can use vinegar to rinse it, but I hate the
smell so I don't.  While this sounds elaborate, it's a pretty standard
tank reset, except the timing is being forced by a disease.

A hot water rinse can easily crack a glass pane.  Like most materials,
glass expands with heat, and if a portion of a pane is much hotter than
the rest, the stress can crack the glass.  The trick is to heat the tank
uniformly.  I do this by starting with hot water under low pressure and I
mist all the panes uniformly.  As the water level rises, I progressively
increase the pressure and keep the water hose going around in a circle
along the top of the tank.  I've never broken a tank, but I've seen a few
broken by others.

This tank reset method is just the way I do it, and I've never read
anything on the topic, so ymmv.  There is probably more effective methods
(bacterial sterilization techniques used by hospitals are far more
rigorous), but at the other extreme, just dehydration kills most aquatic
organisms, so my method is a compromise using readily available hot water
and drying time.

As already mentioned, fin rot is usually easily cured.  If your water
parameters were perfect, then I'd suspect it was bacterial by foreign
entry.  If your water took a dip (power failure, mini-cycle etc), then it
could have been fungal with no external vector (easily cured).  Very
acidic water can also 'eat' Angelfish fins (also easily cured, raise the
pH gradually and I'd drop a bit of Melafix in). hth

1 cup over a 100G tank is not a lot, you need a gravity meter to check for
the level amount of change the salt is making. While the fish are out you
can dose the tank high, and before returning the fish you can do a water
change or 2 to bring the salt/gravity levels back down. I am not sure of the
levels that a angle can tolerate, fresh water is 1.000 and salt water is
1.022 (or so), a 4 foot tank uses about 10kg to get to sea water specs.
Adding salt is assuming the bacteria or whatever is not salt tolerant.

Note: A cheap source of salt used for temporary water conditioning is pool
salt, it's only a few dollars for a very large bag. It's not very clean, so
don't use it for your fish. Use it to aid in killing off the bacteria/fungus
problem, then change out the tank water.

No matter what you do, your filter is going to cope it full on. Before doing
much to the main tank, keep some old filter material safe and wet and after
the main tank has been cured you can return the old filter material back to
the filters then start by adding your filter cycling bacteria or what ever
brand you use to help cycle you tank.

You also have to look into what started it all off, was it water temp
changes (maybe 1 or more deg in less then 24 hours), if so find a way to get
a more stable water temp. If it's water quality, be it ammonia, or nitrites
and nitrates then check that your filters are clean most of the time.

Under gravel filters are my favourite, some don't like them, but if you ask
me the tank water always looks clearer. Anyhow, you need a good thick bed of
gravel in my opinion, fine and course gravel. For such a large tank I'd have
one section of the bottom that isn't affected by the water flow from the
UGF. The important thing to remember with running a UGF, you much do gravel
cleaning. I find that you get the 'Old Tank Syndrome' faster if you don't
clean it good. Once a year at least I siphon out the gravel into buckets and
wash them well with a garden hose.

I don't know a lot about where they start or why, but like most nasty stuff
they like the areas where waste settles, so thats the bottom of the tank and
the filters. And they are the places you need to pay attention to.

For hang on filters I once tried an experiment but adding a drain pipe to
the bottom of the filter closed off by a vavle, once in a while i'd open the
valve and dump the water from it removing the waste rather fast, it was much
easier in the long term for filter cleaning, but I sold that tank and set-up
and never remade the same set-up, I guess I should as it was very effective.
If was very easy to look at the side of the filter and see any waste buildup
and just give the valve a quick turn and it was all gone.