Morning. The fish have made it through the night and are all nice and active this morning. The water is also clearer than it's been for roughly a week. I used the volume calculator on here late last night the work out that my tank is 57 litres. In order for the filter to work correctly with the condensation tray in and the hood on I've not been able to fill the tank to the top. By that I estimate there's around 50 litres of water in there. I then calculated that over a period of 24 hours I'd replaced around 35 litres of water - more than 50% then.
Can I also add that I was a more than a little upset by Mowbz's comment that I'm not listening and I needed to remove 90% water Right Now.
I am listening Mowbz. I'm trying to do the best for my tank and ordering me to remove nearly all the water after 9pm on an evening wasn't helpful.
There has been so much conflicting advice over the last 24 hours that I'm now incredibly stressed and worried about my fish and also very very confused.
First it was remove 20% water, then 50%, then 75% and then 80% and then finally 90%. By the time I went to bed I wanted to cry and I was considering bagging up all the fish today and taking them all back to the aquatic centre and giving up keeping them. I got up at 3am (having barely slept with worry) to check they were all still alive. They were resting ... if only I was.
I'm sorry for the rant but I needed to get it off my chest.
Thanks for listening to me, but the advice above is sound, from me, and from the others who are even more experienced than I.
I appreciate from reading the above this afternoon that you are dealing with illness also, and so i know it must be difficult with an arthritis based ailment to be humping buckets of water around ( i am only 23, but after a motorbike accident where i lost my left kneecap, i now have the same in both, so i know how hard it can be some days),
however;
The fish in the tank really are depending on you to survive, and the water changed above changed in amounts as you came back with different info.
To clarify for the future;
Any amount of Ammonia or Nitrite is potentially lethal to your fish.
If you have .50ppm of Nitrite, and you do a 50% water change, you taken it down to half, 0.25ppm, which is still potentially lethal. This is why we were advising 90% water changes, to get rid of all of it.
Just over a week ago, i read my API test for ammonia wrong, and the world fell out of my backside when i noticed there was 0.25ppm of ammonia in there. Now it turned out that it was actually 0ppm, i was just reading it under poor light, but it didnt stop me emptying about 300 of a total 340ltrs out of my tank at 10pm at night. It didnt matter what time it was, my fish were in danger.
I hope this helps.
Ben
