Help, stubborn amonia

[quattro30]

Hey all,

I have a question that my wife and I have not been able to put our finger on.
We have had our 20ga tank running since this past March. We started with three white clouds to cycle it. The nitrates and nitrites have all peaked and are currently at zero levels. However, we have a very small amount of ammonia left in the tank that we have not been able to get it down to zero.
The tank currently has (three white clouds, 4 O-cats, 2 red velvet swords, and 1 gourami)
They are all doing fine and healthy, but we are afraid to add any more fish at this point because of the small traces of ammonia that we cannot get rid of.

We are looking forward to adding coreys and cardinal tretas, but not until the ammonia goes to zero. We have not fed them in the past two days to see if that would help, but this morning before departing to work the amonia level was the same.
We have done partial water changes without much luck, did we miss a step? Any feed back would be appreciate it.

A little confused,
Thanks
Andy

 

[tstenback]

I would suggest doing water changes but you have already done that. I wonder if its just a false indication. If you are using test tubes have you given them a good cleaning that might help. Also have you taken a water sample to your local LFS to see if your kit is testing accurately. I would say that if all the fish you have are doing fine then go ahead and add the cories but wait until your tankis about 4-6 months stable before adding the cardinals as they can be very particular about the water stability. HTH

 

[quattro30]

You know, we took some water to our local shop here in Houston to have it tested and it showed a little ammonia in the water. We had also thought that it could have been a false indication in our kit, but the shop used a different kit thus conforming it.
Is this normal? As I mentioned, the fish seemed to be in good health but this is somewhat annoying and little bothersome. To those of you that are veterans, where is your ammonia level when you check?

Thanks for the heads up on the Cardinal tetras, we’ll wait until this fall to add some.

 

[tstenback]

My ammonia level is at zero most of the time but its not unusual for it to creep up a bit from time to time. Next water change you do try 30 - 50% and see if that does it for you. Is there any ammonia in your tap water?

 

[Fordaz]

I'd suggest a tapwater check.

Trace amounts of ammonia are tolerable for fish, but like someone here said, trace amounts of Carbon Monoxide are tolerable for humans, but you still wouldn't like to live in a house that has it.

You can use chemicals to remove Ammonia from the water, but I'd advise against it unless you really need to. Try to keep everything as natural as possible, that way there's less to go wrong.

 

[quattro30]

Here in Houston the water is very hard and yes there is amonia. However, I always treat the water before we add it to the tank.

I will try the 50% water change and see what happens. I just called my fish dealer and they recommended a few things:
1. Keep the light on 8 hours max ( we keep it on for 10-12 hours a day)
2. once a day feeding, very small portions.
3. Weekly water changes 20-25%.

he said that we could certainly add corey's at this point, and that it really wan't a big deal to have small traces of amonia. He said once the levels start rising to 1 and above, then it becomes very critical. Right now we are showing anywhere between 0 and 0.25.
Well, thanks for your help.

Great forum folks!!

Regards
Andy

 

[Fordaz]

If you have Ammonia present in the tap water, treating it with regular water treatment chemicals won't remove it (they usually only remove Chloramine and Chlorine... unless it specifically states that it removes ammonia too).

That's probably the cause of the ammonia level, you keep introducing ammonia into the tank with every water change, so as soon as the Bacteria neutralises the old ammonia, you inadvertedly add more.

 

[confusedmanc]

this might sound a tad drastic, but how about using bottled water for water changes, when we moved house last year our new house had been empty for a while and thus the water had sat in the pipes/tank for a while which gave me some water quality issues for a while, then i sent my wife to the supermarket for 45 x 2ltr bottles of still water (she was not amused!) that seemed to fix my problem, and IMO would be better to spend a little money on bottled water then trying to treat your tank with chemicals.


HTH

 

[quattro30]

Interestingly the "solutions" that we use specifically say amonia remover as well as the Chlorines and other chemicals.
You know, thinking about it I would have to say that the problem is coming from the Tap water that we are using.

I also like the idea about still water or drinking water, I will certainly look into it a little more. I just came across something called "Zip drops", I may go and pick that up to neutralize the water going into the tank.

Thanks for your help.

 

[dawning]

I had a similar problem and the guy at the pet store told me that plants can really chew up ammonia. I listened to him and now have heaps of plants. I suspect he was right because about three days after adding a plant, my ammonia levels really dropped. Then I had a nitrite problem and it turned out that I had been overfeeding my fish.. Which mean some food was rotting. All I had to do about that was clean the rocks.. You can do that by just totally moving around all the rocks and then removing up to a quarter of the water.. Or you could get one of those suction things and get gunk out that way. Apparently you should do that kind of thing weekly anyway.. I do 1/2 of my tanks weekly myself and I've got tons of stuff in my little setups.

Cheers, good luck!
Dawning

 

[Becca]

quattro30, I had the same problem with my tank - traces of ammonia and I couldn't figure out where they were coming from.

After much help from quite a few folks here, I found that I was doing quite a bit wrong. (Not vacumming or doing water changes at all for several months will - gasp - cause your ammonia to rise up a bit.) Mine were not near critical, but still needed to be addressed.

I did get teh amounts to lower, but for quite a while afterwards, I continued to have around 0.25 - even with regular water changes, vaccuums, lights being off and not overfeeding. Then I found something that helped me. My intake tube for my filter was a DISASTER. There was literally decaying food on teh inside of the tube that needed to be cleaned off really well. I took that out and gave it a good cleaning in old tank water and with a small scrub brush and my ammonia concerns have disappeared.

Also, if you suspect your tap water, check the conditioner you're using. I didn't know this until I read the fine print on the back of my bottle. If your water has ChloraMine instead of ChloraRine, the conditioner will release trace amounts of ammonia into the water that you THINK is nice and clean adn ready for your tank.

My best advice (you may have done this already) is to treat tap water as you normally would and then test that just for ammonia. See what you find. And like others have said - you can always use bottled water (though that gets costly).

 

[quattro30]

Becca,

Excellent observations, I will check and clean the intake tube for my filter.
I want to thank everyone for great feed back, we will write back for a full report on our findings.

If this isn't some kind of FAQ, maybe it should. These are all good places to look if you continue having traces of stubborn amonia.

Thanks to everyone,

 

[andieschweigert]

i had the same ammonia problem and lost all but 2 of my fish to it.. i went to my local pet store and they told me that when you change the filter cartridge it removes benificial bacteria and spikes the ammonia they gave me some "dirty" water that had the bacteria in it and we used some ammonia killer and now my ammonia level is back at 0

 

[Becca]

Oh yes - that's almost the most important part. You don't want to remove the filter bags and cartridges completely - and if you're just cleaning them out - do NOT clean them in tap water as teh chlorine from teh tap water kills off your bacteria. Instead, rinse them in the old tank water and then put them back in.

Obviously, once every few months or so (depending on the load on your filter) you'll have to change the cartridge, but it shouldn't be a weekly thing as with water changes.

Also, I read somewhere that the BioWheel helps to kill ammonia quicker than most other filters. (This might be a great reason to consider changing you filter. )

 

[leanne]

Instead of buying bottled water you could use RO water (reverse osmosis) that has everything removed from it. You can buy it from fish shops that sell marine fish (cause that's what you use with marine) and it's far cheaper than bottled water.