Thank you :)

[puffypuff]

Just wanted to say thank you very much to everyone in live chat who helped me in my hour of need last night!

I came home from work to find my filter broken - totally packed up, no noise or sign of life at all - and even when I managed to take it apart and clean it, it still wouldn't cooperate! But I've now got the media soaking in a box of tank water, Bommy had a nice big water change last night (at 2am in the morning!) and I've taken the first hour off work to go and buy a new filter unit

Big thanks to everyone who gave me advice

[Dadof4]

While this is going on make sure to keep up on the water changes and closely watch your water parameters. Even when you get your new filter up and running close monitor your parameters for a while (daily checks) as there can be some die-off from the previous media. Floating the media in the tank doesn't give it the continuous higher water flow that's needed hence not as much nutrient reaches all the bacteria, causing die off. It may not be able to keep up with the bio load of the tank then and cause a mini cycle.

[puffypuff]

Yep, we'll be doing very regular water changes (if you have any suggestions of how many / how much we'd be grateful!) I swapped in as much of the old filter media in as I could - it's a much smaller filter though, so slightly worried about that...

Bommy seems completely nonplused so far incidentally. He's having fun in the new bubbles and eating snails the pet shop gave me when I bought the filter!

[pufferpuggirl]

I can't tell from your photo, but what species of puffer is your Bommy? He's very attractive from the photos.

[puffypuff]

Ohh, my avatar is just a Google-steal! I joined the forum a few months before I got my puffer to get some good advice and have never got around to changing it!

Here's my guy though - beautiful, healthy, friendly F8



Aaaaand, after a few too many snails, looking cheeky....

[xrayjeeper83]

Glad you were able to get the help you needed quickly.

Cute puff

[puffypuff]

Okay, just checked my parameters:

- General Hardness: 180 (always very hard here in Bath!)
- Carbonate Hardness: 120
- pH: 8
- NO2: 0
- NO3: Around 20 ppm - but just about to do a 30% change...

Does that sound not too bad for a fish who went without a filter over night? If I do regular 30% changes until the NO3's down to nil?

If anything, he's seems more active now! He's loving the new bubbles the filter makes

(NB: He's not brackish at the moment, please don't burn me as a witch. We're moving him to a bigger tank when we move house, so just waiting for then to make things a bit smoother. He's already doubled in size since we got him, eating well, super active and bright, so I'm not panicing at the moment.)

[pufferpuggirl]

I don't think you have to worry about anyone burning you as a witch! For one thing, your puffer is a Figure-8, so he only needs a light brackish environment anyway, and I doubt bad things will happen between now and when you get him into a tank where you can start adding marine salt to make it brackish.
He's a cute little puffer, and I am envious of all of those of you who can keep a Figure-8. For the life of me, I just cannot keep an F8 alive more than a few weeks.

Personally I don't think everything shuts down just because you didn't have a filter running over night. I can't tell you how many times I used to unplug my filter, then feed the fish, and forget to plug it back in again -- and then remember the next afternoon. I never had any mini-cycles from that.

Glad to hear all is well with puffypuff!

[Dadof4]

Personally I don't think everything shuts down just because you didn't have a filter running over night. I can't tell you how many times I used to unplug my filter, then feed the fish, and forget to plug it back in again -- and then remember the next afternoon. I never had any mini-cycles from that.

After about 30 minutes the bacteria starts to starve for oxygen and nutrients due to low flow in the media, they are not getting continuously bathed with water even though it is being soaked in it. So, yes, it does start to shut down, not everything but some. The bacteria on the outside of the media will survive and sometimes that's enough to cover the bioload of the tank when it gets flow back but more than likely it won't so a mini cycle is entirely possible and the responsible fish keeper will watch for it and try to guard against it.

[JRC3]

Okay, this got me thinking of what to do in a situation like this. Luckily I run the same filters and have backups, but if I didn't this is what I would do.

http://www.youtube.com/user/borderlinea ... ature=mhum

This could also be used with a battery powered air pump in the case of a power outage. It is nothing but a short piece of gravel vac hose, aquarium air hose, and an air pump. I think a main hose with a larger diameter would do even better. And maybe even an airstone too.

Remember that the outlet of your hose into the filter box has to be above the waterline inside of the box. Though I didn't do it, it should work even better if the water level in the tank were raised as high as possible.


I may get a piece of curved filter tubing and cut the short end off just long enough to hange into the filter box. A piece like this.



Good luck, MacGyver


P.S. I think there is a thread around here somewhere about what to do during a power outage so I might post it there too.

[puffypuff]

I don't think you have to worry about anyone burning you as a witch! For one thing, your puffer is a Figure-8, so he only needs a light brackish environment anyway, and I doubt bad things will happen between now and when you get him into a tank where you can start adding marine salt to make it brackish.
He's a cute little puffer, and I am envious of all of those of you who can keep a Figure-8. For the life of me, I just cannot keep an F8 alive more than a few weeks.

Personally I don't think everything shuts down just because you didn't have a filter running over night. I can't tell you how many times I used to unplug my filter, then feed the fish, and forget to plug it back in again -- and then remember the next afternoon. I never had any mini-cycles from that.

Glad to hear all is well with puffypuff!

Thank you

I'm going to keep a really close eye on things for the next few weeks. I swapped in some of the old filter media, but running a new one, I know there won't be as much of a colony left. I have quite a lot of gravel in the tank (probably a little too much to be honest!) - I guess there'll still be some hanging on in there?

Would buying some more live plants help the water quality at all? At the moment I have two live and two plastic plants in the tank... If some more live one would help I'll head down to the store tomorrow?

[pufferpuggirl]

You could put live plants in there, but keep in mind that when you switch to brackish water, most of the plants won't survive or will not look very good if they do happen to live. I doubt they would do much for your water quality anyway. Good old water changes helps water quality. You can always get some nice plastic plants.