Ammonia Wont Die!

[ThisGuy]

hey! my parents 29 gallon bio cube had an ammonia spike over the weekend, found a huge cluster of waste in the filter. anyhoo, handled that problem ad did a 50% water change, we let it sit for about 2 hours and re tested the ammonia and its still off the charts i did full tests on everything else and the numbers all seem ok(waters a bit hard though) but i would think after a 50% change the ammonia should have gone down at least a bit right?

 

[Gilli]

If the readings are very high you may need to do several water changes a day. Do another immediate change as much water as you can drain out (say within a couple of inches from the substrate) then test again and keep doing so -
you are going to have to keep testing and keep changing until you can bring those levels down to a safer reading.

Dont be tempted to try and fix it with chemicals, and cut right back on feeding until your readings are at 0.

just a thought - i assume you know that you must never clean your filter in tap water ?

 

[ThisGuy]

dont accuse me of tap cleaning my filters ok! but yes that is unfortunately what he did

 

[K_Hedin]

If the filters were tap cleaned then any of the bacteria that was there was most likely killed and now the tank needs to cycle again which means lots and lots of water changes and testing.

 

[This Old Spouse]

Or get some nice healthy established media from, say, your tank?

 

[shadow1200]

by some plants ! a lot of plants and don't tap clean the filter.
ppl say fish salt would do it but ive never tryied it ..
and i don't mean normal salt ...
but planets and never clean your filter is fresh tap water get water out of the tank and clean it in there

 

[ThisGuy]

This old spouse! That's the what I'm talkin about!

 

[Gilli]

I didnt accuse you of anything if you read my post - I merely mentioned it incase it was the
problem - and it was!


Ok so now you know - you have an uncycled tank and you have to start again from scratch. Read up on the ' cycling a tank with fish in ' link below if you want to keep your fish alive

cycling a tank