Cloudy water?

[seanothon]

My 35gl Hex has reoccurring cloudy water and I am not sure why. It has been set up for a couple months now but I used a bunch of water, live rock, and sand from my well established 150gl. I recently introduced a filefish I had for over a year and it was doing great. I had a seahorse in QT that had been fine for 2 weeks. I introduced the seahorse and 2 days later I woke to find them both dead and this milky water. The levels were perfect so I can only assume it had something to do with this. The tank has been empty for a few weeks now and this still occurs from time to time and the levels are always 0s across the board and I am not adding any calcium or etc. I wouldn't think it would be a bacterial bloom because it continues to occur even though I don't feed the tank but I guess it could be from algae die-off. I have about 100 watts of CFLs running on 14hr timer every day. Ideas?

[seanothon]

bump

[username in use]

Certainly sounds like bacteria bloom and ammonia problems. Are your test kits old? Have you cross checked them with another set of kits?

[bnumair]

most likely bacterial boom, it will last for a while then go away.

[MARINECRITTERS]

bacteria bloom, it happens alot with new tanks..... it will go away over time

[seanothon]

Certainly sounds like bacteria bloom and ammonia problems. Are your test kits old? Have you cross checked them with another set of kits?

I've cross tested it with another test kit. It reads ammonia when it should.

[username in use]

It reads ammonia when it should.

Does that mean you have an ammonia reading? That's a confusing sentence :lol:

[seanothon]

Does that mean you have an ammonia reading? That's a confusing sentence :lol:

Ha, sorry. No I don't have ammonia reading in the tank. I tested an empty QT tank I had running for several months with no water changes and got ammonia readings.