Having Trouble With My Water Stats

[branjie]

Hi all,
I'm going to try and keep this concise. My new 4 ft tank has been up and running for about 2 and a half weeks. The filter was already cycled, and when I brought it over to the new tank, I brought all of the 100L from the old tank with it. After my tropicals had been in there a week, the LFS said my water stats were perfect, I took the tropicals out, and put in two big Oranda goldfish. Since then I've been having trouble with my water stats. There has been a reading of between .25 and .5 of ammonia the whole time. I'm changing the water (around 30%) either every day or every second day to combat that. The last couple of days I've started to get a trace of nitrites as well. PH has not been dropping, I'm keeping it at around 7.2 as apparently goldies like it around there. I've only got a trace of nitrates.

I'm thinking that for some reason these Orandas are a bigger load on the filter, and what I'm having is like a mini cycle??

Is it possible that my filter isn't coping because it hasn't been cleaned for approx 4 weeks. The flow seems fine, but it's always pretty full on.

Should I be adding my spare uncycled 200L per hour filter to this tank to help out the current 1200L per hour filter?

Or should I just keep up with the water changes and hope for the best?

Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[PRW1988]

Well, first off what's the capacity of the filter you're running on the tank?? If it's not adequate then the chances of the bacteria having a large enough colony could be a problem. Also, goldfish are big and messy fish. You said you had tropicals first, are you using the heater from the tropicals on the goldfish? If so , get rid of it, goldfish prefer a temperature of about 68F, the heater is slowly but surly killing the fish.

Hope this helps

 

[branjie]

The tank is about 175 Litres, and the filter is 1200 Litres per hour. I'm not heating the tank. Thanks for your reply, I'm worried about losing these fish.

 

[dthoffsett]

My best guess is that the bio-load (read poo) of the two goldfish are much more than whatever tropicals you had in it before, and you are indeed combating a mini-cycle. The, best thing I can say is to stick with the water changes, and if you already haven't done so, cut back to feeding once a day or once every other day until your water is back in good shape.

 

[jakeroberts]

i agree dthoffsett the gold fish are making more of a mess and creating a mini cycle

 

[branjie]

You know what, after battling away and doing water changes either every day or every second day, it dawned on me that maybe my filter could be struggling because it needs a clean. I opened it up, and it was really quite dirty. I squeezed the mucky sponges in tank water, and now day 2 after that, my water stats are perfect. What a relief. Just to make sure, I added my spare 200L an hour filter, the sponges having been soaked in the mucky water from the first filter, to the tank. It's a bit of a washing machine in there, but the Orandas seem to be coping very well with it.

Thanks for your advice PRW, dthoffsett and jakeroberts!