High Ammonia Levels

[andymiller6891]

My newest 120L tank is about 6-7 weeks only with a new eheim biopower 240, i have 9 mollys, 5 tetras and a couple of 6inch pleks.

Im still finding my ammonia levels 2+ with the api master test kit.

Im doing roughly 30 litre water change every day to every other day and putting 5-10ml of stress zyme in every other day to help along.

Anyone have any idea when the filter should start holding its own and cut down my water changes to weekly or fortnightly???

I will also be adding an eheim pro2 2126 thermo tomorrow which has been cycling for a few days from a bucket of high ammonia tank water.

Plan is to take out the biopower once the pro2 can hold its own.

 

[mhancock]

Im doing roughly 30 litre water change every day to every other day and putting 5-10ml of stress zyme in every other day to help along.

It is worth leaving the new water with the stress zyme / dechlorinater for 10-15 mins before adding it so that all the chlorine has been made safe, not doing this could mean that you are adding chlorine and killing your good bacteria!

 

[Akasha72]

with levels of ammonia that you have 30 litre change every day/every other day isn't enough. You would need to change a lot more water than that to bring it down to zero(ish)

With levels like that I'd be changing 90 litres to start with, re-test after 24 hours and go from there.

Keep up with the stress zyme too.

 

[CezzaXV]

Akasha is right. If you've got 2ppm of ammonia, a 30L water change (25%) is still going to leave you with 1.5ppm, which is still far too high. You need to do big enough changes to bring it as close to 0 as possible. This wil involve leaving just enough water for the fish to swim. It may also involve changing the water twice or more in a row.