Such a hard lesson learned, but could have been so much worse. I did our usual filter sock wash a few days back, ran it through the "whites" cycle in the washing machine with regular bleach minus the laundry detergent with an extra run through the rinse cycle, max extract and then set them out to air dry. Fast forward to yesterday when the hubby did his tank maintenance ahead of his trip to Alabama for work. Did his water change on his planted tank, checked co2, did his other measurements and whatever and lastly, changed out his filter socks (he has an IM20) and called it good. He went in 1hr later and half his fish were dead! Crap! Did a 10gl water changed and noticed that his water was very "bubbly"...so we change out the filter socks and again notice the bubbles. So we removed them again, soaked them in some neutralizer. Ultimately we decided that there must have been some detergent residue in the washing machine when we washed the filter socks. Thank goodness I hadn't changed out the filter socks on the SW tanks!
By the end of the day, after all the water changes, we still lost all all his fish. We figure it will be a good two weeks of constant water changes, running carbon, brand new filter socks, etc before we can try fish again. For now we are just hoping to not lose his plants. We threw out all our filter socks (3 different sizes worth) and will be replacing them all.
So from now on, we are going to run the washing machine through an empty rinse cycle before we run the filter socks through.
Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk
By the end of the day, after all the water changes, we still lost all all his fish. We figure it will be a good two weeks of constant water changes, running carbon, brand new filter socks, etc before we can try fish again. For now we are just hoping to not lose his plants. We threw out all our filter socks (3 different sizes worth) and will be replacing them all.
So from now on, we are going to run the washing machine through an empty rinse cycle before we run the filter socks through.
Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk