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This past weekend my 7 year old Festivum finally died leaving me with an empty 29 gallon tank. Toward the end the tank got some decent algae buildup from morning sun coming in through a high up window in the living room. I've done two water changes since his death and scraped all the glass and cleaned a good portion of algae off the rocks, but there's still some there. I didn't want to waste the built up bio colonies, so I figured it would be best to not tear down the tank and sanitize it. What do you think... should I go ahead and start restocking it after I put in some new decorations?

~Michael

Bacteria will start to starve within 24hours of no food source. There will still be some waste breaking down and feeding them but without fish the population will soon start to starve. Within a week I'd bet they'd be mostly wiped out unless your tank is really dirty. Not cleaning the tank will probably only shorten the cycle a small amount unless you add fish within a few days. I normally just tear tanks down unless they are heavily planted and rinse everything. Then add substrate or filter media from another tank that still has fish in it to speed up the new cycle. That way I get to start with completely clean substrate and filters as well as soaking the algae off the glass with vinegar.

I've heard you can through some food in the tank to keep the bacteria colonies happy until you get new fish. What kind of fish do you want to restock the tank with?

A simple community tank. Tetra or danio school, cory school on the bottom, maybe a few other fish.

The tank looks pretty good right now. I scraped the class so it's all clean and the gravel is vacuumed. The gravel is easy to care for because it's large... about 1" average size and not a lot of it.

The filter is an Emperor 280 with a 7 year old biowheel which I'd really hate to start over on, but I don't know what people normally do in these situations.

~Michael

Your old biowheel should be fine. What kind of community tank were you thinking about? If it was me, I'd put a pair of black convicts in there. But that is just me.

JBE

You had said that you may want to add a school of cory's to this tank. The size of gravel that you have is really not the best for keeping cory's as it is too large and would allow food to get down into it and then rot which would cause a build-up of bacteria. As cory's are pretty much bottom dwellers this bacteria build-up can prove to be a health hazard to them.

If you are planning on keeping them I would begin to slowly swap out your larger gravel with a smaller one. You could still add some other fish to the tank to keep it cycled while doing this, but I wouldn't put in cory's until this was done.

Jim

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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. -- Mark Twain

Do you have any alternate suggestions for the fish then? I like the large gravel.

Thanks for the advice.

~Michael