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When I woke up this morning, the filter in my tank was making a funny noise. I took it apart and cleaned it, put it back together, and it sounded normal again.

When I got home from work, all the water in the tank was cloudy. This is over the span of 8 hours. I called the local pet shop (not a chain, staffed by generally knowledgeable people), and they said not to worry about it and that I didn't need to change the water. Are they right? What causes this?

For the stats, it's a ~1" turtle in a 10 gallon tank, the water temp is 75, the basking area temp is 88-90, and I had a few guppies in there for him to eat, but I fished out what he hadn't eaten a few minutes ago. There's pebbles on the bottom which my mom put in when she was watching him, but I'm going to take those out since that seems to be what everyone recommends. He has a UVB light.

They told me not to worry, but I'm worried!!!

could be a bacterial bloom, sudden spout of new tank syndrome. i had that happen to me not too long ago. you probably lost quite a bit of the culture when you cleaned up the filter, so it has to go through its stages again.

there's more info on that at this link:
http://redearslider.com/water_quality_issues.html

Thank you. I've read that link before, and it left me a bit confused - should I do full or partial water changes? I've gotten conflicting advice, but it seems to me that if there's a beneficial bacteria population, I wouldn't want to do full water changes since this would disturb the bugs. I've been doing full water changes every 2-3 weeks so far, and everything's looked fine until today.

if you've not done a partial water change recently then you can go ahead and do one now. if you do a full water change you're going to flush out the whole culture and the cycle will wind up repeating itself.

along the same lines... has anyone heard their fluvall filter start humming in a way that doesn't sound normal?

urbancleopatra wrote:along the same lines... has anyone heard their fluvall filter start humming in a way that doesn't sound normal?

A submersible fluval? If it is submersible, you shouldn't hear that at all.

Regarding cloudiness, do you have any charcoal in the filter or just the sponges? Most new filters only come with the sponges that clean out large debris particles. You have to make sure to get a charcoal sponge or small charcoal bag to add into the filter to clean out the chemical wastes (like ammonia....you know, the stuff you can't see because it is dissolved in the water, like turtle pee!).