clouded tank

Question
I have a goldfish in a 10 gal tank. We've had a filter setup and it has worked great for about 6mo. Recently, the tank gets really cloudy a lot quicker, and the fish hasn't changed in size drastically.  I got a new filter setup, but it happened again after the last cleaning.  Almost like there is some kind of fast-growing algae or something....any ideas on how to clear it up?

Answer
Hi Charlie
What color is the cloudy water?
How often are you feeding the fish?  Feed only once a day, and even skip one or two days during the week.  Also net out whatever food is uneaten within 5 minutes.  That'll dirty up water quickly.

How often are you doing water changes?  I recommend doing them once a week and changing about 25-30% of the water.  Be sure you're also using a syphon and vacuuming the gravel really good as well.  All the uneaten food and poop settles down in between any gravel you have in there.  Are you by chance using an under gravel filter?  I'm not a big fan of those, they tend to keep all the food and "gunk" trapped underneath it, not filtering it very well.  This will lead to poor water quality/cloudiness as well.

If you don't have a test kit, I suggest buying one.  The dropper test kits are better and more accurate, and unfortunately cost more, but definitely worth it.  You need to be checking ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate levels frequently.  Especially in that size tank with a goldfish.  Usually it's recommended to have at least 15 gallons minimum per goldfish, but I've seen some sites that say 10 gallons is ok for one.  Once you do all the above I mentioned, you may even consider running both filters on the tank at the same time-assuming you're talking about the hob(hang on the back) kind of filters.

Hope that helps.

Christy