Addition of Canister Filter==> Fish LoSS pls HELP

Doesn't make much sense. Even if you effectively removed every speck of nitrifying bacteria (which I thought might have been the case) the water shouldn't have become cloudy from what you did.

However, I don't know how old/established the tank is. If you have a sand bed that's been undisturbed for a long time, and had anerobic/anoxic layers, if you exposed these layers you might have opened a pandora's box.

Does the tank now smell like sulphur?

 

Sparky what he has done is totally disturbed the few anaerobic pockets and they have since checked out from exposer to oxygenated water and then they died off and when they went they died off they consumed oxygen in the water then that killed the aerobic bacteria or tossed them out of balance and the whole things needs to settle back in and all the bacteria need to reestablish its self to proper number and levels. I'm guessing about 72 hrs there should be some improvement and about 10 days totally to get back to clear . But when it clears it will happen in a few hrs. In the future always do cleaning like this in small increments . Like changing out sand and filter medias ..

 

whats in your filter?

 

The supplied carbon pack and a couple of different filter pads and foams.
washed them all before starting the filter with coolwater and led it dry for abit.

 

Thanks man. How could all this lead to the death of my fish tho?

 

Its about a month old. And the water does not smell. It did alil before installing the new filteration.

 

**UPDATE**
so here it is 48 hours after the addition of the new 185gph Canister filter and adding 3-4 gallons of water to my tank.
I tested the water and found out that my Alk has gone wayyyy too high all of the
sudden:
-PH less than 8.1 (around 8.0) ((
-ALK HIGH 3.1 (I freaked out when i saw the water sample turn BLUEE)
-Nitrite low 0 --> slightly more than 0 but not close to 0.05

I'm thinking the high Alk has killed the damsel. However, I do not know if it is the addition of filter that has caused it or the small part of the sand bed that has been disturbed. I'm going to start doing 15% water changes every day until the levels drop and also add the PH buffer in-order to bring up and stabilize the PH. BTW, the water is not cloudy no more at all.

 

Interesting. How does this work. Like how is it that it clears up suddenly in only a few hours?

 

The fact that you have any nitrites at all means that your tank experienced some sort of cycle so I would think that an overnight spike in ammonia and/or nitrites is what did your fish in.

 

Oo ok but what could raise the ammonia and nitrites overnight? Do you think in the future I would be fine since I've added a good filtration system and so it would clean all the waste out and not let ammonia levels to raise?


TX again