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I appreciate your generosity with the information you've provided. I don't really want to quibble here, but I understand this bit of chemistry and your explanation above is oversimplified (which I can understand considering we're conversing on a web forum. It's probably appropriate to...

My understanding is that I need to worry even less about ammonia due to the low pH of my water. My current tank water and my tap water + Prime both read at around 6.8. Even at 1 ppm TAN that gives me a NH3 concentration of 0.0036 ppm which gives me around an order of magnitude safety factor. I...

Noted. We purchased a new bottle of strips a couple days before we set up our tank that are well within the use-by date. They have been handled and stored carefully. Not saying that nothing could be wrong with them, but it would have to be a factory problem and not an expiration problem or...

I don't think we necessarily skipped the nitrite spike. More like I missed detecting it. We weren't testing everyday. Some of this is confirmed by tests done at the fish store as well. At 15 days post fish we took a sample to the store. They measured less than 0.25 ppm ammonia, "a barely...

Thanks for the reply. I have no live plants. I'm using 6-in-1 test strips and color change on the pad nitrite is pretty subtle at the low end of the scale. Nitrate looks like it should be a pretty obvious pink when i get to around 20 ppm. I'm thinking that what's going on is that I'm getting...

Thanks for the input. A couple clarifications: 1)The fish store said to add one or two fish every two weeks (not once a week) but they said not to add any fish until our cycle had completed. We bring them a sample of water for them to test each time we come in to look around to get their...

Hi, My daughter and I recently set up the old 10g aquarium that has been in my parents' attic since my youth. We started everything up based on advice from our local specialty aquarium store. We are using distilled water supplemented with 2 Tbsp of API freshwater aquarium salts and (so far)...