water change

This is only an hour or two after my last post. WOW! What an hour!

After my prior diatribe of poor management of my tank, I went back to my tank to see my poor fish in BAD SHAPE!

This was a surprise! I’m used to happy, spawning fish. But I went back to the tank to see my fish laying on thier sides on the bottom! Or at the top of the tank, sucking air it the surface! Or worse… just floating randomly around in the current!

Can you say “total panic”? I can. And I did.

While this has never happened to me before, the first action is to correct the water! What went wrong can wait until later…

So I hooked a garden hose up to on of the Ocean Clears to get as much of the “bad” water out as quickly as possible. At the same time I whipped out the seldom used Python hose out of the closet, checked the tap water temperature, tossed the requisite amount of Seachem Prime in the tank, and started blasting tap water into the tank as the old stuff drained.

After a while it was clear that the water level was not changing quickly. So I shut off the new water, and just let the bad water drain. By the time it got to about 15% normal water volume. I stopped draining, and commenced fill only.

The tank is about 1/2 filled now, and many of the fish are swimming somewhat normally. At least they don’t act as if they are dying. But what the total impact is only time will tell. I guess I’ll finish this filling up, confirm that my water parameters are OK, and go to bed. It’s after midnight now.

Hopefully in the morning I will see a tank full of recovering fish. I don’t want to contemplate the alternative. I’ve had these fish a few years now, and until tonight I did not realize how great the attachment was. My wife even came down from her slumber, just to check to see - in hopes that everything would be OK.

I guess we all love these fish.

I’ll let you know the outcome as soon as I know. But for now - and figuring this out has NOT been the immediate priority - it appears that as I was diagnosing the performance of my pH probes, I forgot to turn off the CO2 injection. So somewhere along the line I stuck a pH probe in some 7.01 solution for testing, and the CO2 injection went wild trying to bring the pH down. When in actual fact the tank pH was fine, but the 7.01 solution I was testing caused the CO2 injection to go wild, and start a completely avoidable pH crash.

I cannot believe I was so stupid. But it looks like I was.

Tomorrow we will see the impact. Time for bed now. I hope the fish will be OK.