Hi Guys - I'm In A Cycle Emergency

[martinglover]

Hi all,

I have a tank which has been established for a while but recently moved house so is now 2 months in its new location. All has been fine until we went on holiday and put in (the correct amount according the the packet) a food block. Now, a week after we get back we have lost a couple of fish, and a number more are turning white and stressed looking.

We took a water sample in yesterday (Sunday) to our fish shop and he advised Nitrate levels are high (off the scale) and so the man in the fish shop said to stop feeding them and then bring another water sample in on Thursday. He said to do a water change and a gravel hoover/clean thing. I changed 10 litres of water (tank is 120 litres total) yesterday I have since done some browsing around the internet and had been given differing pieces of advice. Some say to do a water change every day until levels return to normal. Some say to add some salt. Some say add some bacteria (Neutrafin Cycle or similar) I'm really unsure of what to do next as I think I could do more harm than good.

In addition to this, I have ordered an external filter (Tetra ex700) which is delivered tomrrow. Should I wait before fitting this too, or will it help aid the cycle and get the water back to normal faster. (I will keep the internal filter in too). I have done another water change this evening of 10 litres as I'm going to follow the advice that makes most sense to me at the moment, but ANY help is appreciated! Can anyone assist as I want to protect my little guys as much as poss.

Yours in anticipation, Martin.

 

[Wills]

Hi welcome to the forum! Those holiday feeders are a nightmare and often fowl peoples water its quite a common problem. If the tank has problems with high NitrAtes a large 40-50% water change should take most of them out 10 liters in a 120 liter tank just is not enough. Equally if the filter was coping before the holiday food and you have had a NitrIte spike a few large water changes will set it right. Dont clean your filter too thouroughly though.

I would suggest in future feeding your fish ample the week before your away and then just leave them, in the wild fish only eat every 4-5 days and most adult fish can survive upto 4/5 weeks without food but thats like if they are left to starve and should not be done but a week or so is doable.

Wills

 

[Assaye]

As Wills said, a very large water change will sort your nitrates. You should only need to do one big one and then just make sure you do regular smaller water changes. 10 litres just isn't enough if there is a problem - say you have 100 litre tank and change 10 litres, that's 10%. Say your nitrates are at 100 and you want them at 15. Changing 10% is going to do sweet F. A.

You say some people have recommended salts and a cycle product - this makes no sense for nitrate. However, it does make sense for nitrite. Adding salt will slightly reduce the toxicity to the fish but you still need to do those BIG water changes. With nitrite, you may need to do several very large water changes over several days, with at least one a day. Test your water daily during nitrite spikes and always change enough to remove the nitrite down to undetectable levels. This may mean changing 90% of the water. Adding the cycle produce is IMO pointless. Some people find they do help the tank along a bit but it seems that for everyone that has good luck, 10 people find them useless. It's something you can do as well as water changes but never instead of them.

Pop the external on - it won't help initially but it won't hurt. The filter has to mature before it is any use to keep the water chemically clean. However, you could move your old filter media in the internal filter into the external filter and mature it quickly like that. Then you could save the internal filter for times when you want to run carbon or some chemical media and the external can crack on with the biological filtration.

 

[OldMan47]

Hi Martinglover and welcome to our forum. I have absolutely no reservations about what you should do next. Water changes on a tank that is off scale high in nitrates is a given. Anything less would be unacceptable. OK so where does that leave you? In my opinion, your tank will benefit immensely from using an approach that recognizes the development of bacterial colonies in your filter. That means that you will be doing water changes that are based the ability of your media to process biological contaminants but is not limited by any consideration of anything but the present biological load of your fish.