0 Fish, 0 ammonia, Off the charts Nitrites/Nitrates?!?!

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Eman85358

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I have a Fluval V: 5 gallon, in tank simple sump filtration aquarium. It has been running for almost two months. It is supposed to be a low end brackish tank, so 1.005-1.010. I have been keeping it at around 1.008 on average. When I started this tank just about two months ago I added all of the instant start items as well as a pouch of bacteria in a bottle. After about a week of this i saw the levels were good so I added two infant fish, less than 1" on one and 1.3" on the other. There was 0 ammonia and deep deep purple nitrites and dark red nitrates; in the API kit this just means off the chart bad. Needless to say the infants died over a month ago. I decided to fishless cycle this tank by adding a dead shrimp a moss ball and a java fern. Those readings stayed the same until today. Its been about 3 weeks now, finally removed the dead shrimp and replaced 3 out of the 5 gallons of water. after 24 hours i tested the water:
0 Ammonia
0.75-1.00 Nitrites
80 Nitrates
Why is this tank still in the middle portion of a cycle, especially when my specialty fish stores (NOT PETSMART/CO) say that it should have cycled by now 2x over.
 
Hi and welcome to the forum :)

On average it takes about 4-5 weeks for the filters to develop the different colonies of beneficial bacteria they require to keep the ammonia and nitrite at 0. If something happens to the filter during that time (power failure) or the ammonia or nitrite levels get too high, the cycling process will stop.

If you left the dead prawn in the tank permanently it will have pushed the nitrite levels up too high for the bacteria to grow. If you use fish food or prawn to cycle an aquarium, you should remove it after a few hours, depending on what the ammonia & nitrite levels get to.

If your nitrite levels went off the chart, it would have stopped the cycling process. Doing a 90% water change will usually get things going again.

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Ignore nitrates at this stage because your nitrate test kit will be reading nitrite as nitrate. When the nitrites drop to 0, you can start monitoring the nitrates.

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Once the tank has finished cycling it is a good idea to gravel clean and drain the tank completely and refill it with clean dechlorinated water. This will remove any harmful bacteria that has grown in the tank due to the dead prawn and fish and remove all the nitrates. 24 hours after the tank has been refill, you can add fish.
 

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