Calcium Snowstorm!!!

[jimroth]

After all these years, I managed to cause a calcium snowstorm. I was messing with my crummy DIY kalk reactor and I managed to jack the pH (briefly) up to 8.5. Bang, that's one cloudy tank. Fish and corals don't look stressed, and pH has come down to 8.28.

Is there anything you're supposed to do? I was getting ready for a water change anyway, so I swapped out 50G of water pretty quickly.

Does the cloudiness go away on its own?

 

[Phyl]

The cloudiness will go away. I've never seen anything really suffer from that. The more you can control the urge to over react, the better!

 

[JohnS_323]

After all these years, I managed to cause a calcium snowstorm. I was messing with my crummy DIY kalk reactor and I managed to jack the pH (briefly) up to 8.5. Bang, that's one cloudy tank. Fish and corals don't look stressed, and pH has come down to 8.28.

Is there anything you're supposed to do? I was getting ready for a water change anyway, so I swapped out 50G of water pretty quickly.

Does the cloudiness go away on its own?

Bummer Jim. That's really freaky looking but IME not really that bad for your inhabitants. The cloudiness will go away on its own. The only thing you may need to do is put in a power head (or re-angle the ones already in your tank) to get everything back into suspension as some of the precipitate will collect in dead zones.

{EDIT} And of course, while I'm waiting for my slow laptop to load the post, Phyl slips her answer in before me . . .

 

[ricwilli]

Happened to me twice. Never caused any harm. Like John, said might want to keep it suspended. If you don't already have one, add a filter sock so that it can catch all the calcium particles.

 

[jimroth]

All better in the morning, clear as gin, pH back around 8. I think I'll do a Ca test, see if it got knocked way down.

 

[calaxa]

Check alk & Mg as well. A calcium precipitation will more than likely knock those down as well.