Hi all,
Fingers crossed for you.
If you have any sponge media from the powerhead then wrap it around the airtstone and hold it on with a rubber band.
I hadn't thought of that, it is a very good call.
If you can keep the water changes going it will help as well.
Another suggestion is have you got any plants you could put in? Duckweed would be really good. You could then keep the light on constantly until you can get a new powerhead (the plants will help to aerate the water and suck up ammonia.) This is a bit of an "off the wall", suggestion but if you haven't got any aquarium plants, you could use a house plant and just suspend the bottom of the pot in the water (or wash all the compost of the roots and use a polystyrene float?), you won't get any oxygenation from this, but it will take up some ammonia. A "Swiss-cheese plant" or New Guinea
Impatiens (Busy Lizzie) would be ideal.
cheers mate. i think i know what it is... the sand. its about 5 or 6 cm maybe a little deeper in some places. as you know from my pics it used to be really heavily planted. i did a 'big clean' today, and i moved some bogwood and cleaned the sand there with a vacuum. after doing this and topping the water back up, i noticed an egg type smell.
Very likely where the problems started, the "eggy smell" is hydrogen sulphide (H2S), this is toxic if a fish intercepts a bubble of it, but otherwise it will just out-gas really quickly. But, because hydrogen sulphide was present, it shows that the sand was anoxic (had a high "redox" potential), and when you disturbed it the chemical compounds in the
reduced state would have been exposed to
oxygen, and they would then have reacted using oxygen in the water. (From hydrogen sulphite (H2S) to sulphate (SO4), in this case H2SO4 is sulphuric acid) this is part of the COD (Chemical Oxygen Demand)). The image below shows what happens, (although on a steel plate rather than in sand)
There may also have been undecomposed organic matter trapped in the sand, and this would have become available to the ordinary decomposing bacteria (hetrotrophs in the diagram), and they would have used oxygen as well. There are more oxygenation bits here: <
http://www.plecoplanet.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4628>
cheers Darrel
