Is there such a thing as too clean?

[red devil123]

a little wile back I had a 10 gallon tank with some community fish and a small electric blue crayfish. I put 2 20 gallon and a small canister filter on it just because I had them to use, a week later all the fish and the crayfish were dead, the ph was perfect and the water was treated and cycled. did I miss something or could the water be possibly to clean

 

[boldtogether]

TO CLEAN? No, but the tank may have cycled, stressing your fish to death. If the new filters didn't have a benificial bacteria colony established and or you removed the old filter and didnt swap the media into the new filter/s, cycle.
How did you know the tank was cycled? Did you test water perameters? PH alone wont tell you the tank has cycled, and treating the water for chlorine/chloramines isnt cycling.

 

[red devil123]

all the water conditions were perfect for the fish I was keeping, the tank was up and running for 2 weeks before I put any sort of fish in the tank

 

[BODYDUB]

2 weeks is not enough to cycle a tank.............

 

[pjsmetana]

2 weeks is not enough to cycle a tank.............

Agreed. Minus the "............."

 

[tbonewarrior]

Read up on cycling a little. Running an empty tank with no ammonia doesn't cycle it. Sounds like classic ammonia poisoning to me. Sorry for your loss.

 

[Bderick67]

How did you cycle the tank if there were no fish in it?
Did you add ammonia to the tank?
Were the filters new or moved from an existing tank?

 

[vr6fan]

smaller tanks have less margin for error when it comes to water parameters

 

[Alhazred]

To cycle a tank you need waste or amonia in the tank for bacteria to nom on.

Try again put in one small fish feed sparingly and just to save on electrisity just use one filter. Let the tank run for a bit so that the single fish can make waste and bacteria can grow. Then slowly add more fish to step up the bacteria workload.

Or buy and dose a small ammount of pure ammonia using this to slowly build the bacteria culture in an empty tank then add fish once the ammonia has been depleted but before your bacteria starve.

Or add water from an already cycled tank.

I prefer the 3rd and 1st methods. The second can be messed up to easily leading to fish death.

 

[piggy67]

Fishless Cycling:

Fishless cycling is a way to mature an aquarium by providing ammonia for beneficial bacteria to colonize. This form of maturing an aquarium reduces the chance for fish loss from insufficient populations of beneficial bacteria.
Beneficial bacteria consume ammonia and convert it to nitrIte where another type of bacteria convert nitrIte into nitrAte which is less toxic to fish and must be removed through water changes.
To start a fish-less cycle, set up an aquarium including pumps,lights,filters and heaters( bacteria will colonize filters/substrate etc.). Set the temperature to around 80 degrees. ( this will speed up the process) add ammonia so ammonia tests around 4-5 ppm. This can be fish food which will create ammonia while decaying or ammonia from either commercially sold ammonium hydroxide or ammonium chloride.
Add enough ammonia daily to keep ammonia level at 1-2ppm. when ammonia and nitrIte levels are at O ppm do a water change of 70-90% to remove most of the nitrAte build up. Cycling should be complete and fish can be added.Cycling can take up to 6 weeks and adding excess amounts of ammonia will not speed up the process. In addition beneficial bacteria can be bought at most fish stores and aquatic related catalogs, just be sure there is sufficient amounts of ammonia to support the bacteria