Need Aquarium Help

[jonmulzer]

You have to be really careful using chemicals like that. I assume it is a flocculant that helps small particles bond together into something large enough to be filtered out. They can also cause gills to stick together and suffocate the fish. It is best to find the cause of the problem and then eliminate that. For slight cloudy hazes I have a Magnum HOB canister filter that has a micron cartridge that I sometimes use for water polishing but never will I use a flocculant in one of my tanks.

(I was a fish geek long before I was a computer geek or wood geek. )

[khf314]

Another thing I just remembered that we did with goldfish was to add aquarium salt to the water. There's an article http://www.goldfishinfo.com/salt.htm that talks about the dosage. This runs counter to conventional wisdom that salt is fatal for fresh water fish but it really does help keep the fish healthy.

[sscherin]

On the few freshwater tanks we have had (we mostly do salt) we kept live plants..
for one they look better and they consume any nutrients that algae would use to grow..
So smaller or no algae blooms..

Same idea works on saltwater but we keep the macro algae (seaweed) down in the sump

[jonmulzer]

Goldfish=herbivores
which means.....
Live plants=expensive fish food