# Heartbroken



## Pigeonfish (Jun 23, 2011)

I changed my ten gallon build to a 20H gallon because of a leak...

I thought using the same substrate... plants.. filter.. would not cause a cycle... but I was wrong... Tank is cycling and my fish died overnight....

I have never seen fish die that quickly though. Could it have been the Pool Filter Sand? It was not washed and I read the bag this morning it is not responsible for pollutants. Water seems pretty cloudy too. What did I do wrong? Sigh.


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## majerah1 (Oct 29, 2010)

I have no advice,sorry.Ive never used the pool filter sand.

My deepest sympathy though.I dont know what I would do if I lost all my fish,I would be devastated.


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## Pigeonfish (Jun 23, 2011)

majerah1 said:


> I have no advice,sorry.Ive never used the pool filter sand.
> 
> My deepest sympathy though.I dont know what I would do if I lost all my fish,I would be devastated.


Thanks. I hope Susan gets here soon :/

I just want to make sure it couldn't have been the pool filter sand.. I would feel much better if it was just my mistake of believing the cycle wouldn't come thru.

I guess I have to start over again...


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## Pigeonfish (Jun 23, 2011)

Well doing some research... I had no idea I had to wash the pool filter sand before putting it in the aquarium... I guess that is where I went wrong...

Now that the sand is in the tank... How would I go about cleaning it? Do I just rip the tank apart?


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## majerah1 (Oct 29, 2010)

Is it a beasl build?I would say remove the sand and rinse it really well.If its just sand,though its a pain it shouldnt take too long and then just rebuild it.

Sucks I know.I had to do similar because uprooting a sword pulled all the peat surrounding it out and made a huge mess in my tank.


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## susankat (Nov 15, 2008)

Some pool filter sands has to be rinsed, If it was real cloudy sand particles could have gotten into the gills but I have never had it kill fish. I have switched to using grizzly pool filter sand. When I first got it I put some in a bucket to rinse and nothing was coming out of it so I just poured it into the tank and filled, was crystal clear.

If you were using the same substrate, was it capped by the sand? Did you put the same filter on the new tank? If the old substrate was cleaned and then capped with the sand it will throw the tank into a cycle. If you used the old filter on it, you could still have a mini cycle as there wouldn't be enough bacteria yet for the bigger tank.


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## Pigeonfish (Jun 23, 2011)

majerah1 said:


> Is it a beasl build?I would say remove the sand and rinse it really well.If its just sand,though its a pain it shouldnt take too long and then just rebuild it.
> 
> Sucks I know.I had to do similar because uprooting a sword pulled all the peat surrounding it out and made a huge mess in my tank.


Yeah, I just cleaned the sand now. Didn't take as long as I expected.



susankat said:


> Some pool filter sands has to be rinsed, If it was real cloudy sand particles could have gotten into the gills but I have never had it kill fish. I have switched to using grizzly pool filter sand. When I first got it I put some in a bucket to rinse and nothing was coming out of it so I just poured it into the tank and filled, was crystal clear.
> 
> If you were using the same substrate, was it capped by the sand? Did you put the same filter on the new tank? If the old substrate was cleaned and then capped with the sand it will throw the tank into a cycle. If you used the old filter on it, you could still have a mini cycle as there wouldn't be enough bacteria yet for the bigger tank.


I think it was a combination of me not cleaning the sand and the cycling restarting.

I didn't clean the eco, I just put one side of Eco and one side sand...

I cleaned this morning and just mixed the two now. Water is still sorta cloudy but I turned off the filter and the air pump to see if gravity will bring down the debris.

Would sand bring up my water hardness btw? Just curious.

Anyways... I'm just gonna restart the cycle.. I'm guessing I could use fish food... Afraid to use ammonia since I already have plants in there.


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## susankat (Nov 15, 2008)

Pool filter sand is inert so it won't mess with the hardness


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## jrman83 (Jul 9, 2010)

Eco doesn't need to be rinsed. What did you loose?


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## Pigeonfish (Jun 23, 2011)

jrman83 said:


> Eco doesn't need to be rinsed. What did you loose?


I've been jumping all over my posts. Here's what I did:

I put Eco complete from my ten gallon into half of the twenty gallon.

I never rinsed it ever.

Then I put the Pool Filter Sand, without rinsing it (I think I went wrong here) in the other half of the tank.

Even though I used the same filter, same substrate, same everything, (I even put most of the water from the ten gallon in the twenty) it seems my tank started cycling again because I tested the water after the fish died, and I saw hints of ammonia and nitrites.

I lost 3 Platys and A Bumblebee Catfish.

I still find it weird that these hardy fish would float so easily within hours of being put in the new tank but my guess is that the small trace of ammonia plus the sand debris that I didn't rinse and clean initially must have messed up their breathing.


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## susankat (Nov 15, 2008)

I have had some pfc foam at the top when I have first put water on it, even after rinsing it. It will go away but never did like it. I could have messed with the oxygen levels. Did yours do that? I would go ahead and run the filter, but put some filter floss in it to pick up the smaller particles.


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## Pigeonfish (Jun 23, 2011)

Yep I started running the filter and the air stone... I'll grab some filter floss when I can, but it seems to be clearing up at least.


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## alhays31808 (Aug 27, 2011)

i'd just let gravity do its job


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## AliceInDallas (Dec 18, 2010)

Pigeonfish said:


> I'm just gonna restart the cycle.. I'm guessing I could use fish food... Afraid to use ammonia since I already have plants in there.


My comments here are strictly aside from the issue of the sand and the problems it may have caused you. I just want to share something which relates to a way to induce a very fast cycle when you are in a whale of a water crisis, which I inadvertently discovered this summer. 

It started in April with me setting up a new koi pond in Dallas, and then successfully moving twelve huge 14 year old koi from a 20,000 gallon spring-fed pond in Arkansas, to a relatively small 3000 gallon above-ground pond in Dallas. (Please bear with me here for a moment, and I will get to how this koi pond stuff relates to rapidly cycling a small indoor aquarium under obscenely bad conditions.) 

In the process of getting the new pond cycled and safe for my newly moved, really huge fish, I tried Microbe-Lift PL for ponds, for the first time ever. I needed to accelerate the establishment of the pond's biofilter, and I needed to do it really fast. So I poured in a quart of Microbe-Lift PL. Well, it worked better than my wildest imagination would have guessed. 

So anyway, the pond is cycled and the koi are spawning like crazy. And -- without really thinking through the implications -- I captured about a hundred fertilized eggs in one of those fuzzy floating incubators that koi breeders use. And they hatched. I let the baby koi sit in the pond for about 3 weeks or so in the floating incubator, feeding them micro-stuff. 

THEN I decided that I had to bring them inside, in order to feed them real food and grow them to a decent size. At that point they are about the circumference of a hair, and less than an 8th of an inch long. 

So I set up a brand new 20 gallon aquarium with an external hanging filter filled with floss and activated charcoal, etc., and placed the hundred koi fry in it. They ate like pigs. They grew. Very fast. And the water quality started to go downhill after a week or so. It became very cloudy and started to smell, really bad, despite rapid filtering and lots of aeration. 

So I started changing out half of the water every day. Did that for about 3 weeks. By then the koi are a quarter inch long, 100 of them. And the ammonia problem began to be more than a daily water change-out could handle. 

And I started to panic, just knew that my indoor baby koi experiment was going to crash and burn. 

>>>> So what I did .... and here we get to the issue of the need to rapidly cycle a small freshwater aquarium ... is that I bought a new bottle of Micro-Lift PL for ponds. (One quart treats over 4000 gallons.) I shook it up really really well .... held my nose (it smells terrible, with a strong rotten egg smell which rapidly dissipates) .... and I put 1 (one) tablespoon of it directly into the 20 gallon stressed-out aquarium that had 100 ravenous baby koi in it. And said my prayers.

Well, folks, I am here to tell you that the result was astounding. Within 24 hours the aquarium was clear, had no smell, and there was no discernible ammonia in the tank. Nitrites were extremely low. Within another 36 hours the nitrates had started to show a bit, but were at a very acceptable level. And they stayed that way, despite the presence of 100 fast growing koi babies. My filter was cycled, and stayed that way, with a small water change every 3rd day, until those babies were old enough to move to the floating mesh crib in the big pond, 5 or 6 weeks later. 

I lost only one koi baby in all of this process. I would never have believed it, if I had not seen it for myself. And so, for what it is worth -- especially if you have a crisis situation on your hands with an overloaded, uncycled aquarium -- you might want to try a tablespoon or so of the stuff we cycle koi ponds with. Micro-Lift PL. It really and truly works, when probably nothing else would work, in a true crisis situation.


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