Problem With Water Quality

[risso0529]

Please help..... I have kept tropical fish for a while - however I only had a very small tank before. Around 4 months ago i bought another tank second hand complete with around 30 fish (molly's, guppys, and platys) the new tank is approx 50 gallons.

I have been testing the water regularly and everything was fine at first, no ammonia, nitrite or nitrate. I have been changing around 10% of the water every 2 weeks and adding chemicals to remove the chlorine. However I stupidly cleaned out the filter about 4 weeks ago and now my ammonina and nitrite levels have gone through the roof. Severel of the female guppys have died which must be down to the water quality as there is no sign of disease.

I have tried doing more frequent water changes (every other day), adding ammonia removing media to the filter and ammo lock. I have also been adding stress zyme to try and rebuild the biological filter.

However despite this the readings are still ammonia 6, nitrite 5 and nitrate 20. Is there anything else I can do to try and rebuild the biological filter. I am worried that more of the fish will die soon if I cant sort this out. I dont have anywhere else to put this many fish while the tank re cycles.

Please help, I really appreciate any advice you are able to give me.

 

[TATTIESCONE]

Do you know anyone who can give you some media from there filter as you have probably killed some of your bacteria when you cleaned your filter(only clean your filter with water from your tank,never clean tap water)

 

[Gilli]

Did you clean the filter out in tap water? If so thats why you have those readings as you will have killed all the good bateria. Only ever gentley squeeze your filter media out in used tank water. Did you add the correct dose of dechlorinator to the new water you were adding? You should be doing a thorough gravel vac and changing at least 25-30% of the water every single week even in a fully cycled tank.

You now have a fish in cycle tank - follow the advice on the following link asap and make sure you are changing practically all of the water as much as you can drain out with your fish still in every day until your ammonia and nitrite levels are less - every other day is not enough with such high levels of toxins in the water. Cut right back on feeding while your readings are high as food will make it worse. Dont use any chemicals to try to bring the levels down they are pretty useless!

Your filter will rebuild the bacteria itself theres nothing you can do other than if you know anyone who could give you some of their cycled foam from a mature filter. Its going to take at least 6-8 weeks of hard work to keep your fish alive if you follow the advice in the link. Good luck!

fish in cycle

 

[risso0529]

Did you clean the filter out in tap water? If so thats why you have those readings as you will have killed all the good bateria. Only ever gentley squeeze your filter media out in used tank water. Did you add the correct dose of dechlorinator to the new water you were adding? You should be doing a thorough gravel vac and changing at least 25-30% of the water every single week even in a fully cycled tank.

You now have a fish in cycle tank - follow the advice on the following link asap and make sure you are changing practically all of the water as much as you can drain out with your fish still in every day until your ammonia and nitrite levels are less - every other day is not enough with such high levels of toxins in the water. Cut right back on feeding while your readings are high as food will make it worse. Dont use any chemicals to try to bring the levels down they are pretty useless!

Your filter will rebuild the bacteria itself theres nothing you can do other than if you know anyone who could give you some of their cycled foam from a mature filter. Its going to take at least 6-8 weeks of hard work to keep your fish alive if you follow the advice in the link. Good luck!

fish in cycle

Hi thanks for your reply - I did use old tank water to clean the filter not tap water but I did really wash everything well so maybe I over did it... I have using a gravel vac every time but I have only been changing about 10% of the water every other day. I will floow the advice on the link and see what happens - thanks

 

[fishnovice]

Please help..... I have kept tropical fish for a while - however I only had a very small tank before. Around 4 months ago i bought another tank second hand complete with around 30 fish (molly's, guppys, and platys) the new tank is approx 50 gallons.

I have been testing the water regularly and everything was fine at first, no ammonia, nitrite or nitrate. I have been changing around 10% of the water every 2 weeks and adding chemicals to remove the chlorine. However I stupidly cleaned out the filter about 4 weeks ago and now my ammonina and nitrite levels have gone through the roof. Severel of the female guppys have died which must be down to the water quality as there is no sign of disease.

I have tried doing more frequent water changes (every other day), adding ammonia removing media to the filter and ammo lock. I have also been adding stress zyme to try and rebuild the biological filter.

However despite this the readings are still ammonia 6, nitrite 5 and nitrate 20. Is there anything else I can do to try and rebuild the biological filter. I am worried that more of the fish will die soon if I cant sort this out. I dont have anywhere else to put this many fish while the tank re cycles.

Please help, I really appreciate any advice you are able to give me.

If you still have kept the original tank and have 2 tanks, take a piece of sponge from the filter of teh smaller tank and add it to the filter in the large one to seed it with good bacteris. If you only have one tank, maybe you can get your lfs to give you a small piece of filter sponge or filter media from their tanks.

 

[risso0529]

Hi

I have just spent the last hour emptying water and refilling - I have added tap water conditioner - I will test the water again tomorrow and do water change again if test still high, will keep doing this until test shows water safe - thanks for all your help - ps in the process of emptying the water I found quite a lot of fry in the tank so maybe have some babies if they survive 0 I have lots of live plants for them to hide in so fingers crossed a few make it! I managed to change approx 30 gallons of water.

 

[risso0529]

Hi all

Just to give an update - I followed the advice of water changes everyday and the tank is now fine again. I have reduced the water changes to weekly but will continue with daily tests for the next couple of weeks to make sure that the levels dont rise again. Thanks for all your help.

 

[risso0529]

i

 

[Gilli]

Good job!

 

[risso0529]

Hi all

well I thought I had my problem sorted but I came home tonight and just out of the blue 2 of my fish look unwell. As you can see from my posts above I have been having trouble recently having lost the cycle in the tank (due to over eager filter cleaning!) and have recently been doing water changes everyday to get things going again. I was testing the water every day and there was a ammonia and nitrite spike then reading have gone to 0. These have been at 0 for a couple of weeks now.

I thought everything was getting back to normal, in fact I was looking at the fish last night thinking that they all looked really good. However when I came home this evening one of my female guppys and one of the platys where just hanging near the bottom. I thought they didnt really look right and as I watched the platy is just gasping and the female guppy is swimming around but her tail looks really down and she is struggling to swim properly. Her tail looks a bit funny - not rotting or flacking but sort of clamped together rather that in the half moon type she as normal.

I immedialty thought that the water quality must have gone bad again so did a test and these are the results:

Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 80
ph 7.0
temp 26

I really dont know where I am going wrong, I have had a very close look at both fish and cannot see any form of parasite or infections - they look ok apart from the gasping and the weak swimming.

There seems to be good water movement so I dont think it can be the oxygen.

Does anyone have any idea what this could be and how I can go about sorting out this problem.

Thanks

Larissa

just managed to take a photo of the female guppy by catching her in the net - was not like this yesterday!!

 

[elisew]

Hi

Sorry to hear that things are going downhill again. The nitrate seems very high, can you test your water straight from the tap and post the result? At least then we have some idea of what the general nitrate reading should be.
I personally would do another good sized water change to try and bring the nitrate level down, I may be wrong but I thing it's probably the high nitrate that's causing your problem.

Please test your water straight from your tap with no conditioner in it and let us know the result?

 

[risso0529]

cannot seem to get photo to upload - will keep trying

Thanks for your reply - when you say test the tap water do you mean just for nitrate or for all ammonia, nitrite and nitrate?

 

[elisew]

All of the other readings seem to be fine, it's just the nitrate result that concerns me so if you could test just for the nitrates that would be great

 

[risso0529]

Hi

The tap water nitrate reading is around 40

 

[elisew]

40 is considered normal so that's good, I would strongly advise a 50% water change as soon as is practical and then another 50% a day later. Your levels are double what it is when it comes straight from the tap so you need to get it as close to 40 as you can.

A good way to keep nitrates low is to add lots of live plants, do not over feed and do a minimum of 30-40% water changes weekly (including a gravel/sand clean)

Let us know what the levels are when you've done a water change?