Cloudy Water for Weeks

[EmperorsReef]

Started a tank this fall and finished cycling with a few clown fish in September. I have been adding a few more fish since and in November I had my first bout with cloudy water. After about two weeks or so with no change in cloudiness I setup ozone and within 72 hours at low levels it cleared up.

Now over a week ago my water became cloudy again and has gone unchanged, even with the Ozone (my ORP is reading 375 so I am not pushing anything into the tank at the moment).

I thought this was just the tank going through the startup cycling process and going through a bacterial bloom from the new inhabitants but after comparing my tank to pictures online of bacterial blooms mine seems much worse.

Parameters all seem in check except Nitrate and Phosphate are unreadable which I thought might just be from new tank and dry rock. All fish and inverts were accounted for

Any thoughts?

 

[Troylee]

Woah! Are you using rodi water? A uv sterilizer will clear it up but we need to find the root cause of the problem.. it looks like a mixture of bacteria and algae blooming.

 

[EmperorsReef]

Woah! Are you using rodi water? A uv sterilizer will clear it up but we need to find the root cause of the problem.. it looks like a mixture of bacteria and algae blooming.

Yeah I have a 6 stage AquaFX filter. 0 TDS coming out and resin looks about only half way exhausted in the first stage.

 

[MnFish1]

Started a tank this fall and finished cycling with a few clown fish in September. I have been adding a few more fish since and in November I had my first bout with cloudy water. After about two weeks or so with no change in cloudiness I setup ozone and within 72 hours at low levels it cleared up.

Now over a week ago my water became cloudy again and has gone unchanged, even with the Ozone (my ORP is reading 375 so I am not pushing anything into the tank at the moment).

I thought this was just the tank going through the startup cycling process and going through a bacterial bloom from the new inhabitants but after comparing my tank to pictures online of bacterial blooms mine seems much worse.

Parameters all seem in check except Nitrate and Phosphate are unreadable which I thought might just be from new tank and dry rock. All fish and inverts were accounted for

Any thoughts?

Unreadable 'high' or undreadable 'low'. This looks more like an algae bloom than bacteria or a combination. If your NO3 and Po4 are 'unreadable high'- you should be doing water changes.

 

[EmperorsReef]

Unreadable 'high' or undreadable 'low'. This looks more like an algae bloom than bacteria or a combination. If your NO3 and Po4 are 'unreadable high'- you should be doing water changes.

Good question and sorry for confusion. Unreadable low, as in non-existent. I’ve avoided doing frequent water changes because of that low level. Only done them monthly at this point