Is it normal for a fish tank to smell

Upon investigation, I discovered his decomposing body deep inside his favorite hiding spot. Any missing fish could very well be the source of the strange smell. Be sure to check behind every rock, decoration and plant.

You would be amazed at the tight spaces that fish can squeeze themselves into. Your dead fish might not even be in the tank at all! If your fish can jump, check behind your aquarium stand and any nearby furniture to find the body.

Fortunately, a dead fish is an easy smell to control. The smell should soon disappear when the fish is removed. Unfortunately, this is the most difficult type of smell to control — no fish lives forever. The best thing you can do is give your fish a long and healthy life by getting the essentials right. Good water quality, not overstocking, proper diet and regular maintenance go a long way to seeing your fish live a full life. It can also be responsible for the horrible smell coming from your aquarium.

You see… Your fish are only going to eat so much food in one feeding session. Anything that is uneaten falls to the bottom of your aquarium and begins to rot. As the food breaks down, it releases gasses, causing a foul odor. The smell becomes stronger as this uneaten food builds up. A good tank maintenance routine, such as filter cleaning and using a gravel vac, should remove most traces of decaying fish food and the smell along with it.

This way there will be no fish food left to give off bad smells. If your tank is stocked correctly, you will perform your weekly maintenance routine long before the poop begins to stink up your tank.

This one is an easy fix! Overstocking is a problem commonly experienced by beginners who do not know better. Before you buy fish for your aquarium, use a stock calculator like this one or ask an expert for their opinion. Dead plants are easy to spot. They no longer look like themselves and often turn a slimy brown or black color.

If you have a plant that only has a few dead leaves, some light pruning is all it takes to remove the rotting bits. And remember, algae are also plants. Algae can rot, leaving you with a horrible musty odor.

Blue-green algae in particular can make your aquarium smell funky. I know, I know… This is easier said than done. But by ensuring the plants have adequate light and nutrients, you give them the best chance to thrive in your aquarium. Otherwise, why not invest in a clean-up crew for your tank? Malaysian trumpet snails happily devour any dead or decaying plants without any effort on your part.

You know all the things mentioned so far? Well, every one of them can be sucked into your filter system. After all, the job of a mechanical filter is to gather any gunk that is floating through your aquarium and collect it in one place.

Doing so should remove most of the stinky sludge that has been stinking up the joint. If the odor coming from your fish tank smells like rotten eggs, then your substrate might be at fault. Sand or very fine gravel that has compacted over time can produce zones where there is no oxygen.

As waste gets trapped in these pockets, bacteria convert it into gases. Smelly gasses! A deep gravel vacuum or regularly stirring sand may prevent these smelly pockets of gas from building up in your aquarium. The water conditioner you add during your water change could also be responsible for making your tank smell funny.

There is no mistaking the eggy smell it gives off when you open the cap on the bottle. However, once you add the conditioner to your water, the smell soon fades to the point of being unnoticeable.

Avoid water conditioners with smelly ingredients like sulfur, which is often the cause of that rotten egg smell. Important : Before you read this step, make sure you have identified the cause of your bad smell from the list above. If you do not remove the cause, the following methods will not fix the lingering odor.

First, you want to clean your tank. Your aim is to remove every piece of rotting organic matter in your aquarium. When trying to remove bad smells, I highly recommend being more thorough than during a regular maintenance routine. So, set aside extra time to do the following:.

The reason for this is that you are dislodging all the rotting gunk, allowing it to float freely in the water. This should only be temporary. By monitoring your water quality with a test kit and sticking to a strict maintenance schedule, you should knock out the bad smells in no time.

This will add fresh, odorless water to your aquarium while removing some of the foul smelling water. While you are waiting for the bad smell to clear up, you can add a special ingredient to your filter to stop the bad smells in their tracks…. When it comes to absorbing bad smells, activated carbon works wonders.

Also known as a carbon filter, this magical substance pulls odors from your water and stops them from reaching your nose — it will also make your water clearer, removing discoloration. The only downside is that a carbon filter needs to be regularly replaced, at least once every month.

Once the carbon has absorbed all it can hold, the bad smell will return. Check out our detailed guide on activated carbon filters for more information. If you have made it this far, you might have noticed a pattern to preventing bad smells in your aquarium. You see, almost all bad smells come from rotting organic matter. And with proper maintenance, these should be removed long before they build up and stink up your room. I've been keeping fish for over 30 years and currently have 4 different aquariums — it's an addiction.

I'm here to teach you everything there is to know about fishkeeping. I also use this site as an excuse to spend lots of money on testing and reviewing different aquarium products! You can find my reviews here. It was my pleco who had died. He is super shy. When I cleaned my tank looking for the smell, I found his rotting body. It was disgusting.

I removed the body and added some carbon as per your suggestion. The smell was gone in under an hour. Thank you. Oh no, that sounds like an awful surprise. I wouldnt use certain ornaments as I once found the skeleton of my plec trapped inside starved to death!! Any ideas? Are you regularly cleaning and maintaining your aquarium? Start by testing your water with an aquarium test kit, just to make sure nothing funny is going on. After that, regularly maintaining your tank is vital.

For instance poop and uneaten food will fall to the bottom of your aquarium and gunk it up, requiring you to clean it with a gravel vac. As for water changes, you should be doing them regularly, not just when your fish tank begins to stink. It all depends on the size of your tank, the type of fish, filter system etc. Using an aquarium test kit to keep an eye on the water quality will give you a better understanding of what is happening in your tank in regards to water quality and how often you should be changing it.

Water changes are typically performed every one or two weeks, during this time most hobbyists clean their tank too. I changed my filter today and part of my water, but used a water conditioner for the rest.

I also changed from sand to gravel, due to a problem with algae growing in the sand. Since doing this, the room the tank is in smells like a permanent marker exploded. What could be the cause of this? Are my fish going to be ok? If this is the case, air your room out — open a window and get a fan in there. I found this cool idea how to make a aquarium out of a ice tea jug with the spout to remove water. I have 1 beta and 2 miniature African frogs I know I put in one to many first the tank was cloudy went to petsmart and they told me to get a Moss ball put it in the tank and it cleared up but the next day it smelled like something was died in the 2 gallon tank.

I have no filter or air pump. I have to keep a lid on the container because I have a cat and if he had his way he would be eating my beta. I have fine sand at the bottom and small rocks on top of that. I want to remove the sand and just keep white rocks. First should I get a air pump? We have no room for a bigger aquarium and this one seemed to fit perfect on the end table.

One problem the cat I have to lock him up in the bedroom while doing anything with the tank because he is wanting to get to the fish. The lip we have put lots of holes in it so all I want to do is start all over can I do that. I put out 2 gallons of water in a bucket yesterday with the lid on it because my plans where to take everything out of the jug remove the sand and put in the new rocks keeping the fish in the old water until I get the tank set up.

Gotta get rid of that smell. Constant water testing and water changes will be key. If you are serious about this fish keeping thing then it will be easier to just get a larger tank.

It also sounds like you have not cycled your aquarium , an essential first step of fish keeping. White cloudy water is common on new tanks and generally clears up by itself — the marimo moss ball was unlikely to be the fix. I just started a 39gal tall cichlid tank. I have 5.

I was wondering what the clear junk that comes out of nowhere is exactly. The least common cause of a smelly aquarium is rotting plants. Rotting plants can smell really bad and will definitely stink up the whole room. The good thing is — dead plants are pretty easy to spot because they turn black or brown. Dead plants can also ruin the water, so it is best to remove them as soon as you come across them. If you have a plant that only has a few dead leaves, you can pluck them out and let the plant stay inside the aquarium.

Algae can rot and produce a horrible odor, so be careful! Try to keep as many plants alive as possible. Make sure your aquarium has light and the right nutrients that the plants need.

This does not mean that no plant will ever die — if they do, simply remove them while cleaning your fish tank. Cleaning a dirty filter should simply be part of your cleaning routine.

Substrates can smell when waste gets trapped. If the waste is not removed and is stuck there for a very long time, it decomposes and turns into different gases that produce rotten smells. Some waste might be hidden behind rocks, so make sure to use a vacuum in your tank thoroughly. If your sand is stirred regularly, it can prevent waste from accumulating and reduce the chances of a rotten smell.

The water conditioner that you will add during your water change could also be causing the bad smell. It is very important to clean your aquarium regularly. Here is what you have to do to prevent your aquarium from smelling. Clean the rocks and the decorations because they might have fecal matter on them.

Rinse it if you feel like there is gunk trapped in it. Remember that cleaning your aquarium regularly will prevent it from smelling. This is because when you remove all the rotting fecal matter, food and other waste, it will float in the water. Besides this, you have to make sure you are giving the right type of food because the wrong food, fish will not like to eat, and the remaining food will pollute the tank. Dead plants: though plants are useful to fish and they maintain a natural environment in an aquarium, they can be the cause of fish tank odour.

Plants continuously grow and produce lots of leaves, and some of them can die in the aquarium, which could remain at the bottom of the tank. The dead parts of the plant release gas into the aquarium and whenever the fish hang out in the filter area, the bad smell you can realize. Fish poops: it is logical that having too many fish in an insufficient place that will create too much poop in your aquarium.

Like other garbage fish poop also makes a tank smell bad. Though a fish tank filter can help to get rid of poop, But having too many fish, the filter may not be able to destroy enough poop from the tank water. The smell which comes from fish waste is normally slight, but the only extreme odour will come when you have so much fish waste. Ammonia: Once you know how ammonia smell like is, the rest of the time you will identify the ammonia smell. Above the 0 PPM of the ammonia level is harmful to your fish because it is toxic and can make odour in the fish tank.

The decent mucus is helpful to fish health, and it is essential to keeping fish well. But the extreme level of mucus sometimes can make the bad smell around the aquarium, which is created from poor water quality.

The new wood sometimes releases tannin and changes the color of the water like tea, and it could be a cause of bad smell in the fish tank. The remedy of anaerobic bacteria is to clean the substrate and gravel regularly with a vacuum. The vacuum can help to keep the substrate, gravel, sand, and other ornaments germ-free so that anaerobic bacteria cannot be able to build up in the tank. Fish tank smell like rotten eggs or sulfur indicates that your tank has serious harmful bacteria problems that might occur for using of imbalance chemical or damaging filter or air pump in aquariums which is an unhealthy and stressful environment for your fish.

To keep your fish tank from rotten egg or a sulfur smell, you should always keep the tank clean and all the maintenance to be working well. Get a habit of removing uneaten food and other types of debris from the aquarium, which make the filter clog can give you rid of the sulfurous smell. Mold grows in an aquarium is rare to happen, but it is not impossible to grow there. It is said that blue-green algae are not actually algae, but bacteria that have various types of spices act in different traits.

If the moldy smell you think comes from blue-green algae, it will be associated with the tank you can see by visible on aquarium glass, rocks, driftwood even on fish.