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well i did a water change about a week ago 40% and forgot to add hardness crystals to adjust my hardness (aus water is very soft) so with my lack of intelligence i had my fish swimming in 40ppm and pretty acedic ph.. i found this out 4 days after the water change after one of my angels was acting weird.. it has now been fixed and hardness is on 200 a bit high i noe.. and ph perfect on 7.

the main problem is that my 2 angels look really sick now.. have flakey skin.. the fins are rekked one has a cloudy eye and they stay near the surface.. they also havnt been eating.

what should i do.. i have treated the tank with melafix.. but they still look bad.
all other fish in the tank look healthy and are eating.
rummys and corys.

help
:#(

r0b3y attached this image:

Rob

Combine the treatment with Pimafix. Turnn the light off for a few days to help settle them down a bit.

Dont worry I forgot to turn the heater back on in Brtta tank for 24 hrs no losses thank good ness.

Keith
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Rapid changes in water chemistry will cause a good deal of stress, just keep it stable and they should improve. It is actually a lot worse for fish to go from acidic water with low hardness to harder water than to go the other way. That would explain the symptoms. Stress could easily have brought on some kind of infection, but stable water quality should be enough to get them healthy again.

Just to be safe, test ammonia. Those symptoms could also indicate ammonia poisoning. If you don't have a test kit, do a water change but be very careful to exactly match the pH and hardness of the tank.

I have to ask why you're using hardening salts? Angels like soft water with low pH, most fish do. I wish I had soft water.

hey thanks for replies.. lights are off.. i use hardness salts because melbourne water hardness is 0ppm.. has to be put up.
ammonia is 0.

r0b3y

Are you sure your hardness is 0? It's not going to be unless you use RO/DI or straight rain water that hasn't sat in a well at all, so from an inert cistern or something.

I was curious so I looked it up myself:

http://www.melbournewater.com.au/content/water/water_quality_and_treatment/analysis_of_melbournes_water_for_2005.asp

So that's about 1 dGH, 1 dKH in most areas. That is low but it's perfect for angels. Most fish will adapt to softer water except for a few hard water varieties. So if most of your fish prefer softer water in general I would quit the hardness salts. There is far less chance of something going wrong if you discontinue them. If you have plants or you are just worried, or your other fish prefer harder water you'll probably want to raise the hardness just a bit from the tap, get it up to about 50 ppm / 3 dH and stop there. Forget about pH being perfect at 7.0, it isn't. There is no perfect pH. In fact IME most fish are for more concerned about the proper hardness of their water than pH, 200 ppm is very high for angels. They are fine in it, but certainly prefer lower.

One thing I'm wondering is your KH. KH is usually pretty close to GH especially when adding hardness buffers, if yours is then I'm not sure how your pH would be 7.0 unless you're injecting CO2 or adding some other kind of acid from peat, PO4 buffers, etc. Test your KH as well, if you're injecting CO2 you want to maintain that around 50 ppm or so with the GH. If you're not injecting CO2, don't have plants, etc. the lower KH of the tap will be fine.

Once the angels are looking better again you can slowly begin to acclimatize them to your softer tap water. I would change water out, about 15%, and replace it with pure tap. Sounds like a lot but it really isn't and the fish will be able to take it. Even if the tank water was replaced with 15% RO/DI with a 0 ppm hardness, you'd still only decrease your hardness by 15% or 30 ppm. Fish are more than capable of handling that as the hardness in a body of water can lower significantly from a heavy rain. You can do 15% every day with no real fear of shock until you get your parameters where you want them to be. I would suggest either matching your tap or if that seems too low, aim for about 50 ppm hardness. Test as you go with a good quality GH and KH test kit.

Lowering the amount of buffer used will decrease your potential to make mistakes, which as you've seen can be very hard on the fish. In this case I think the sudden shift from 40 to 200 ppm hardness was probably much more harmful than the drop. Next time something like that happens (which won't if you stop altering your water chemistry so much), allow the fish to adjust to the soft water and then increase hardness very slowly at a rate they can handle.

Fish are far more capable of adjusting to a sudden drop in hardness and TDS than to go the other way. The reasons for this are simple. Think about a lake, it will take months for a lake's hardness to increase significantly from evaporation etc., this usually happens in the dry season when there isn't any rain. Suddenly the rainy season hits and the water body is flooded overnight by water with no hardness at all (if we ignore runoff for a moment). I found one experiment (link) that found the total hardness in a pond decreased from 15 to 7 GH after a rain (that's 267 to 125 ppm), more than half! Fish have adapted to handle sudden downward shifts in hardness, pH and TDS quite well but they don't do so well with sudden increases.

Let me know if you have other questions.

Last edited by trystianity at 16-Sep-2005 06:34

Angels are more susceptable to rapid changes than most other fish. When it comes to stress, there about as hardy as a neon. Well... maybe not that bad.