Emergency! Please Help!

[RustedKnight]

Sorry I can't be of more help, i'm still learning this myself.
Well mate it's 12.30, get yourself some sleep, nothing can be done about it tonight. And hopefully some help will arrive in the morning

Also, good to see yet another welsh located member on here.

 

[Rogue4Fish]

Over feeding can cause Nitrite hikes.

Cut down the feeding to once a day until the tank gets more established, this might help.

 

[Aqua Tom]

Pour a glass of tapwater, test it & write down the results, then leave it sitting somewhere for 24 hours & test it again, you will be suprised at the difference.

 

[riggs111]

Thanks for the advice aqua Tom, I'll do that, but just out of curiousity what will that mean if the results have changed?

Adam

 

[waterdrop]

Hi Adam - sorry to hear about your problems!

Sounds like you already knew to do gravel-clean-water-changes and the members have reinforced this good advice. I agree that we may never know the cause - sometimes that can be elusive.

High nitrites can be difficult. If you happen to get an imbalance (eg. lose more of the nitrite processing bacteria but less of the ammonia processing bacteria) the nitrite in a smaller tank can spike very quickly because the A-Bacs (ammonia processors) produce about 2.7ppm of nitrite for every 1.0ppm of ammonia, meaning any shortage in N-Bacs leaves exaggerated amounts of nitrite(NO2) in the tank.

In my experience listening to the many comments of members here, both nitrites and nitrates tend to "hang out" somewhat in the substrate and the filter. This can make if difficult to clear them sometimes. In a filter that is only 4 months mature (biofilters continue to mature for their entire first year) you do risk a little setback with the bacteria if you perform excessive cleaning but I still think some filter maintenance may be in order.

In the middle of your next gravel-clean-water-change I would gently squeeze out the sponge (in the bucket of just-removed tank water)(by the way, set aside enough of the removed tank water that you can refill your filter after the next steps to keep the media wet) with an eye to having the most loose debris release into the water. I would dunk and swish any ceramic noodles or other large type media and I would gently squeeze out any polyfloss like the sponge. Now put the media back in the filter and fill it with the water that you set aside before you cleaned things out (to keep the media damp before you can complete the tank refill.)

The gravel clean itself should be as thorough as possible. Remove anything that gets in your way and of course be careful of the fish - neons can be quite aggressive going after the cleaning cylinder and get themselves crushed. Try to get the cylinder to the bottom of the tank and give the gravel in the cylinder enough time to release its debris before moving on. Sometimes it takes a 50% refill of the tank with conditioned (dechlor & temp matched) water to then have enough water to continue cleaning the rest of the gravel in a thorough way when it has excessive nitrites/nitrates.

With a smaller filter such as yours, the frequency of cleans may need to be increased (every other weekend for instance, rather than the default 4 weeks) and of course the gravel-clean-water-changes should be each weekend unless you are on a trip.

With a tank that is only 4 months old, where you didn't have all the information to know how to measure things or quite what the regular maintenance habits should be, its possible that it somehow was really not quite cycled. Its also possible that your local water authority "shocked" the water with extra chlorine/chloramines and some of your bacteria were killed. I usually recommend that conditioner be dosed at about 1.5x what the instructions say (but not more than 2x in a tank under a year.)

Good luck and keep up the hard work. We'll hope it only turns out to be a "mini-spike!"

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

Please try something for me that you have not yet mentioned. Try putting together a bucket full of water change water that has been dechlorinated and then test it for ammonia. What I am trying to find out is simple to state. If you local water authority is using chloramine to make your water safe to drink, it will break down into chlorine and ammonia when you treat it with dechlorinator. The chlorine is simply removed by your dechlorinator and the ammonia is converted into a less toxic form but you will measure its presence with a typical test kit. When I test my own fresh water, I get almost a whole 1 ppm of ammonia in the new water. That means that large water changes result in levels near 0.25ppm ammonia when I measure them. Since the dechlorinator makes the ammonia into its less toxic form, I simply wait a few hours and find that the bacteria in my filter have removed the trace of ammonia that I got with my new water.

 

[Lolly123]

Hi,

You've been given a heap of good info so far but my mothers tank had a similar experience with a huge nitrite spike, and her tank has been running for a couple of years.
Looking at the picture, it looks like your gravel size is quite large but i cant tell how deep your bed is,our tank has fairly big gravel too, i found the reason for my mums problem after a browse of the tank, she vacuums the top of the gravel, but underneath, food had fallen between the gravel pieces and just rotted, as well as plant matter. You'd be surprised how deep all the leftover food and matter can go. I had to completely remove sections of gravel and clean, the stink was amazing and obviously the cause of the problem in our case. Cant say for sure that this is causing yours, but just something to look out for.

As you are doing, I changed about 90% of the water and managed to save all the fish.

Hope it improves for you and you find out what is causing this!