New And I Did It All Wrong...

[OhMyFish]

Thanks for the frank talk, waterdrop. I like to be told directly so I don't misunderstand--remember, step-by-step. Your words are reinforcing what I'm beginning to learn/understand. I thought I was on the right track about the ammonia & nitrites being the worst and to concentrate on them by reducing the level with a large water change. However, I think my confusion (now cleared?) is that in doing so much/many water changes, the tank never has time to stablize the bacteria growth and pH level. Thus, my confusion led me to hopefully think that 30% water change would be suffiicient. Note that I asked for confirmation since I certainly am not totally confident in my knowledge of taking care of these fish!

Summarizing...during the past times with the ammonia levels up, I had been doing 50-70%, not 30%, water changes daily. A couple of times, I couldn't do much of a water change (10-30%) due to unavailble time and on those days, I tried to get in a second water change about 12 hours later. It seemed like nothing was ever cycling. Finally, when the ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates were zero, I learned about the effects of such a low pH. I did a 30% water change two days ago even though the readings were still 0 so that it would be easier on me to add the coral in some semblance of "decoration" as I had not a bag to hold it.

I tested my tap water again this week and nothing had changed from before. (I think I've now tested my tap water 3-4 times but would have to look in my written log to be sure. Yes, we do keep track of everthing we do for if I'm confused & forgetful, I'll never be able to teach my son!)

I do so want to do things right and get off this merry-go-round...I'm as dizzy as my remaining fish!

 

[waterdrop]

very good.. glad to hear you were doing larger ones at that your thinking was understanding about water changes was going in this direction..

With -any- Fish-In cycle, your "hands are tied" and you, in a sense, hardly can worry about the scientific details of cycling per se. The cycle will take at least weeks and maybe months and is, to you, just an invisible thing you know is going on in the background. What the "fish-in cycler" is concentrating on is what those amm,no2,pH,KH readings are every day and what pattern of water changes and water doctoring is going to keep their fish alive and happy.

In the background, the A-Bacs and N-Bacs will be growing their little colonies (they look like a stubborn black stain on whatever the get on) and eventually you will be surprised and rewarded when you realize you keep getting the "zero" readings on your tests. (In your case the black staining will be going on in your gravel of course because there is no filter media for it.)

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Miss Wiggle]

phew not had time to have a total read through of this thread as I had intended but just read the last page or so. will try and get back and review the whole lot tonight if I can and see if there's anything that Ive missed but just to back up what WD is saying really.

The absolute focus for now is to keep ammonia and nitrite under 0.25ppm, prefereably at 0. You do as many water changes as you need to to make sure the levels are there.

Anything else is secondary at this point, don't get too massively caught up worrying over pH and KH fluctuations or the stress from big water changes.

It's a case of risk mitigation, the ammonia and nitrite pose the most significant risk, the risk is so much mroe significant than the others that you can fix it at the expense of other factors.

I'm sure someone will have mentioned this at some point but just incase they haven't, considering you are doing regular water changes you would be much better off buffering up the KH and pH with something that stays in the tank such as crushed coral or tuffa rock than doing it with baking soda as you'll just be removing some with every water changes.

pH shock is one of those funny areas that there is a lot of discussion over, i think there may be a useful link lurking somewhere about this which i'll try to dig out (v busy, if anyone wants to look for a topic i started called 'the science behind acclimitisation' and stick a link here that would be great.....) but to summarise, for years it was thought that rapid changes in pH caused harm to fish, then someone got to thinking when a fish is out in the wild and it rains they may be in a lake which has a lot of limestone in and around it so a naturally high pH, the rain has a naturally low pH which would then send the pH of the water down at every significant rainfall, so why don't the fish in the wild die off instantly whenever it rains then? The simple answer is that pH shock is not such a significant factor as we once thought and we really don't need to worry too much.

regarding effective filtration, biggest concern with filters is media capacity, i.e. space for the bacteria to grow. If you think you don't have enough them there's a pinned topic in the DIY forum which has a step by step to making a sponge filter, they're inexpensive and you could make a couple and bung them in as a stop gap until you can save up for a decent cannister.

will read some more detail in the thread and give some more specific advice if i can asap.

 

[OhMyFish]

Thanks, waterdrop and Miss Wiggle. I look forward to more comments/suggestions/information--even if it is the same from different people.

I just did a 70% water change. Only 3 gallons of it is at room temperature. All the rest (about 14 gallons) is from tap. As the weather cools, so does my tap water. I haven't yet figured out how to maintain more room temperature water on hand but that is probably a future topic for dicussion. I'm hoping that by the time the fall really sets in (and my room temperature drops to its normal of 57 unless the wood stove is running and the tap water feels barely above freezing!), I will not be doing frequent water changes.

I did add 1 tsp. baking soda back to the tank.

In an hour or so, I'll test the pH and ammonia.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

again don't worry over the temp drop, i do big changes on my tanks no problem, i do change swith a hose so run water straight from the tap (and it gets v cold up in yorkshire in the winter as well!) but i just run it slowly and then the heater has time to kick in.

if you're not using a hose what you can do is take out the water you want, add in say 20% of the tanks water then just leave it maybe half an hr with the heater on, then add another 10% of water back in, leave it half an hr again and so on until the tank is full, just means doing it over the course of an evening rather than in one go, but you can be going about your usual business in between, not like you've to sit waiting by the tank the whole time.

is there a reason you're using baking soda instead of tuffa rock or crushed coral, it seems like the more appropriate choice for you right now (apologies if this has been covered before but i missed it)

 

[OhMyFish]

Miss Wiggle...a simple summary is that 6 of our fish died, found out pH was too low and that the pH was dropping from tap of 7.4 to 5. Not finding "oxyshells," I tried using a powder pH buffer without success. I was told here and at PetCo that my tank was in dire need and to use baking soda. That seems to be helping. I recently (2 days ago) found the coral and have scattered it lightly accross the gravel. However, my understanding is that it takes the coral a couple of weeks to help.

Fish are continuing to die...now have 3...started with 6 bloodfin tetras and 1 emerald green cory...added 2 neon tetras, 2 silver-tipped tetras and 1 albino cory...1 neon died the next day and replaced it with another neon (still living)...the following day another neon died and replaced it with an x-ray tetra...5 bloodfins died at once (found out about the pH problem)...a week later the last bloodfin died...this week, 1 silver-tipped died and the two cories died overnight...left with 1 neon, 1 x-ray and 1 silver-tipped. Remember the topic of this thread..."New and I did it all wrong..."

I'm certainly learning the hard way...

Thanks for the info re the cold water. The next time I change the water, I'll reposition the heater closer to the bottom. (DH has it vertically on back of the tank so I have to turn it off when I do water changes as the directions said not to run it unless covered with water.)

 

[OhMyFish]

One hour after the water change (with 1 tsp. baking soda), the ammonia is 0 and the pH is between 7.2 and 7.4 (not vivid blue like 7.4 but not as green as 7.2...if that makes sense!).

 

[Miss Wiggle]

ok, try to get the pH and the ammonia and nitrite to hold steady then, remember that the cycling process is pretty grim you may find you're at a point where you are out of the woods in that the stats hold steady and everything is technically correct, but the fish are still dying. This is often because the damage was done when the cycle was on-going and the fish struggle ever since. It does sound like you have the levels under a reasonable amount of control now and at that point there's not a lot else you can do, it gets to a bit of a fingers crossed point and then any fish which have been damaged severley by the cycle may die off and any other fish will survive and should be fine from then onwards.

 

[waterdrop]

Thanks MW, I really think it'll help OMF to hear things from us as I know her son is very sad to have now lost the pretty cories.. really guts everyone when these things happen.

I've been thinking that I certainly hope you will keep going or try again, OMF, as you are not wrong that it is a wonderful hobby and can bring much pleasure and feeling of accomplishment for someone your son's age. My son is 12 and our situation is similar. My thought is that if and when things get better you were to go with some pretty hardy fish for a short period, zebra danios perhaps, that would be a good transition to buy some more time to trust the tank. I have every hope that a KH kit and KH control along with pH will, and along with your improving water change skills will eventually turn you into a great aquarist with a nice stable tank.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OhMyFish]

Last evening turned out to be a bit more busy than I anticipated. I remembered I had forgotten to check the tank's water when I awoke in the middle of the night...but did not get up to do it!

At 9:30 this morning, all three fish are alive with no signs of the fungus that a couple of the other fish had had. The ph has dropped to 6.6 and the ammonia is 0. I added more baking soda, hoping it will bring the pH up--I'd like to try to keep the pH between 6.8 and 7, if I can. This afternoon is feeding time...I'll be interested in learning if the ammonia level rises this evening. My husband thinks there is something in our air that is causing the pH drop. I am to pick up more air hose so he can run an air rock to a container of water outside the tank and see what happens to the pH then. Yet another interesting experiement.

I did manage to get to PetSmart last evening--no liquid test kit for the water hardness on the shelf. I looked at their filters--they had a lot of different ones and pricing seemed better than PetCo. I'll keep a watch for the sales.

 

[Mr Bliss]

I'd say that if there's something in your air that causes such a rapid pH drop just by diffusion, you need to evacuate the house immediately.

It really seems to me that what's happening is that you have low KH tap water. The decline of pH and KH in an aquarium is a perfectly natural process, but the pH normally declines only a little, except when the initial KH is very low.

It sounds like your tap water would be ideal for a blackwater biotope aquarium, heh. But setting up one of those would be a bit too tricky for a beginner I reckon.

 

[OhMyFish]

What number would be a low KH? Using test strips (can't find liquid tests), the tap is:

Nitrate 0
Nitrite 0
Total Hardness 150 gh/ppm
Total Chlorine 0
Total Alkalinity 80 kh/ppm
pH 7 (with liquid tests, 7.2)

Is 80 KH low?

Ah...this house is over 50 years old and "strange" things do happen here...knives hanging on wall have the side of the blades closest to the wall turn color...white appliances in closed cabinets turn yellow--but only on part of them and not every white appliance...nothing cleans off...can't figure out any of these things...nothing would surprise me...

 

[Mr Bliss]

Hmm well this is interesting. An alkalinity of 80 is the equivalent of KH ~4 for practical purposes (alkalinity is also affected by phosphates whereas KH is a measurement of carbonate and bicarbonate only, but tap water generally doesn't contain enough phosphate to make a difference), which should be perfectly able to maintain a stable pH. But in the earlier test your tank water was at an alkalinity of 0. A lot of decaying material could drop it rapidly, but such a fast decline from 4 to 0... I don't know. I'm a bit mystified to be honest.

 

[OhMyFish]

I haven't posted because, frankly, I'm still on the merry-go-round! As DS says every morning, at least the fish are still alive!

The pH declined little in the separate container of tap water with an air stone. It declined by from 7.4 to 7.2 during the first 24 hours...and during the 2nd 24 hours, it rose again to 7.4. I'm beginning to think I'm going crazy but I was very careful to do the liquid pH tests as accurately as possible. DH's current experiment is a separate container of conditioned water with an air stone.

The tank itself now...

Every 24 hours, the pH drops from 7/7.2 to 6.4/6.6. I add 1/2 tsp. baking soda which brings the pH up to 7-7.2 and the same thing happens during the next 24 hours. The ammonia level increases to at least .25 every time I feed the fish (a tiny bit every 3 days) or 48 hours after a 70% water change. Sometimes the ammonia level increases to .50 to .75 after 48 hours.

So...no change as far I as see...just this vicious circle.

 

[waterdrop]

OMF,

I forget, have you taken any actions to acquire a liquid-based KH test?

~~waterdrop~~