Overfeeding Please Help

[el-reefo]

Fellow Hobbyists,
Recently I set up and auto-feeder and all had been working fine until I changed the type of food. I set it up with some granules instead of flakes and on the first run it dumped what I would normally feed in about a week... maybe not so much but plenty. When I came back to the tank the sand was covered on some spots with the uneaten food.
I have a pretty decent amount of turbos and nassarius; but, I don't know if this will be enough or if I should do something else. the fish seem fine, but I don't know if the food will continue to decompose and raise my Ammonia levels too much.

Anyone has any advice/comments?

Thanks.

 

[axio]

You need to pull that food out immediately. Do not just let it sit there and rot. Any time too much food gets into the aquarium you need to grab a net and scoop it out. I tell my customers that anything left on the bottom after 1-2 mins should be scooped out.

You do not ever want to rely on your bacteria or critters to take care of it for you. Why even risk it if it takes no more then a minute to scoop the food back out?

If you did leave the food in the aquarium for multiple hours I suggest starting to test your water to make sure nothing gets off track. And be prepared to do small water changes to get back on track if that is the case.

 

[el-reefo]

Thank you. I can't make any changes until tonight when I get home. I hope my fish are still alive then.

 

[enderg60]

If you use flakes most feeders work fine. But if you use pellets, especially small pellets they will always dump WAY to much.

But you can fix it by simply putting a piece of tape over the opening to make it smaller. Takes a few tries to get the size of the opening right, but once you have it youre done.

For small pellets in my ehiem feeder I have it on the 2nd smallest opening and then its tapped off to about half that size. Works great for me.

 

[fishlips]

I mix my flake and pellets. And use second smallest opening. I only use feeder only when vacation. Witch means once every few yrs.LOL

 

[saltwaterwannabe]

I have never used a feeder for saltwater as most of my vacations are short enough that everything I have can survive fine without added food for a week. I do use a feeder on my cichlid nursery once the fry can start eating micropelets. I test the feeder a few times first to ensure consistency and find it works fine with micro pellets. I am sure there are at least a few different opinions based on actual usage, but my experience is the autofeeders work fine with small pellets. I have 37 fry atm and plan to move them to the autofeeder in about a week. btw...I will have more fish than I can hold once my fry are ready to move to the main tank, so if anyone wants juvenile cichilds, just let me know.

 

[jennm]

aXio;1110785 wrote: You need to pull that food out immediately. Do not just let it sit there and rot. Any time too much food gets into the aquarium you need to grab a net and scoop it out. I tell my customers that anything left on the bottom after 1-2 mins should be scooped out.

You do not ever want to rely on your bacteria or critters to take care of it for you. Why even risk it if it takes no more then a minute to scoop the food back out?

If you did leave the food in the aquarium for multiple hours I suggest starting to test your water to make sure nothing gets off track. And be prepared to do small water changes to get back on track if that is the case.

This.

Hopefully you've vacuumed it all out by now. If you haven't, do so. Try not to agitate the water too much and suck out as much as you can with a siphon.

If that ship sailed already, water changes, vacuum the substrate, clean the filter media, add some Prime or Alpha (for any ammonia/nitrite spike).

Jenn

 

[saltwaterwannabe]

JennM;1110892 wrote: This.

Hopefully you've vacuumed it all out by now. If you haven't, do so. Try not to agitate the water too much and suck out as much as you can with a siphon.

If that ship sailed already, water changes, vacuum the substrate, clean the filter media, add some Prime or Alpha (for any ammonia/nitrite spike).

Jenn

+1...and I am sure most would agree.

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[el-reefo]

I want to report on the aftermath. I came back home and made a water of about 20%. I tried extracting the food; but, more sand than food was coming out and I didn't want to continue disturbing the fish. I just left it there and I haven't fed the fish since. I am going to feed some shrimp this afternoon. I will also change from pellets to flakes again. The fish seem ok. The cleaning crew has been busy. He water was a little murky after the water change; but, mostly clear for now.


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