Experienced Novice

[SushiAk49]

Just using the chips to bring the ammonia down some. Not relying on it completely. Just to make it easier on the fish. Still doing water changes. Ammo is half what it was. Now around .50ppm so hoping that if it was so overloaded w/ ammonia it would prevent the bacteria good growth this should help.

 

[the_lock_man]

That's a lot better, but still you need to keep the level further down, as close to 0 as you can get it. Did I say to look at the green link in my sig? If I didn't please read it. If I did, please re-read it!!!

 

[SushiAk49]

Working on getting it down more but it's finally dropping after well over a month, it was a constant 4.0. Thank goodness for amo lock. It's all the old plant materials and fish food and other stuff in the gravel still breaking down from the last time the tank was running. My husband was a heavy handed feeder. I only feed once every 3-4 days and he's not allowed to feed them any more. I vacuum the gravel almost every time I do a PWC and it is just I have very dirty gravel. I need a turbo charged gravel vac. l half temped to rent a wet vac lol. My plants are doing well, and I do take them out and remove the parts that are dying one a week. Being more careful on what kinds of plants as well. So the tank is improving. Just so slow. My bio bag is falling apart so instead throwing it out (my hubby did that last month) I filled the new bag and clipped the empty used one to it to help as not to lose any helpful bacteria. I hope that was the right thing to do.

 

[This Old Spouse]

I'd say if your hubby threw out your biobag last month, that might be a good part of the problem. Congrats on seeing improvement! I used to just stuff the old disintegrating bag into the new one.

 

[SushiAk49]

Woohoo everything at 0. But I plan on doing PWC every three days for and daily test for a while. Still lots of organic stuff in substrate. I know it may be to soon but I added some new guys to the tank, two ghost shrimp. And I'll make sure I wait a week before anything else gets added.