Our system for adding ammonia is often confused by beginners. You want to establish a regular time of day when you add ammonia (not exact, just around the same time roughly) such that 12 hours later will be a time when you can normally be home to do a second test. This often fixes it to a morning time and an evening time for most working folks and you have to decide if you want your ammonia adds to be morning or evening. Doesn't matter which, just that you are regular about what you do.
Then you establish a notebook and whenever you add ammonia or test, you make a time entry in the log. You also note the temp, water clarity and any other actions/observations relating to the tank. These notes become invaluable later on.
OK, so the -amount- of ammonia added is of course a "custom" amount you've arrived at by testing your own household ammonia and knowing that this amount regularly achieves about 5ppm in your tank when added. You add this amount only once in any given 24 hour period and always at the time you've set as your "24 hour" mark (ie. either morning or evening) and you -only- add it if you measured a true zero for ammonia at some point during the previous 24 hours (ie. at either your 12 hour test point or your 24 hour test point which you presumably just did.) So, in short, the ammonia should go down to zero prior to you adding more, or else you don't add. It doesn't matter if it subsequently goes down to zero right after that, the bacteria (the A-Bacs) won't die off from not getting ammonia for another 24 hours. (In fact, bacteria die-off from lack of food is a curve, being quite slow for the first 2 or three days and then getting steeper.)
On the other subject, nitrates(NO3): I think you're getting the hang of it. Basically, its not a reliable scientific thing for us because of tank location of water collection type issues and because the tests themselves are notoriously flakey, both from their very nature and from operator variations, but we, very unscientifically, still tend to do them and just take away the positive messages and somewhat ignore the negative ones, lol. The nitrate(NO3) test actually becomes somewhat more useful later after the tank has been in operation for a while as the nitrate(NO3) reading becomes a bit of a "canary in the coalmine" type signal about whether good maintenance (primarily gravel-clean-water-changes) is being performed on a regular enough basis for the given fish load and tank conditions. Well maintained tanks (very generally) will usually only be 5-20ppm NO3 above tap water NO3 level, whereas ones that routinely push up above 40+ above tap level are telling us there may need to be maintenance changes.
OK, hope that's detailed enough for you.
(had to get my fingers typing with MW egging me on like that
)
~~waterdrop~~
