My tap was coming out brown recently... The good news is that it is just iron in the water from work further up the main... The bad news is that they aren't sure when it will stop. They are coming to do a complete flush of our pipes on Wednesday.
If you put this into your tank, the filter should be able to deal with it assuming you have a high enough flow rate in your tank.
Sorry. I had to leave, but wanted to give you some feedback. Basically in the nitrogen cycle, ammonia is produced by the fish, that ammonia is processed into nitrite by bacteria, which is later processed by other bacteria into nitrate. If you are getting zeros in the ammonia reading and the nitrite reading, there is no way that the nitrate is also zero. It just CAN'T be accurate. That test being by far the most complicated (I had trouble with it too in the past), I assume there are high nitrates.
Secondly, the nitrates in the tank builds up as nitric acid. This would drop your pH. Depending on the buffering capacity of your tank, how well it can cope with nitric acid before the pH is actually affected. BUT, if all this is happening, chances are good that the tank is actually cycled, but that the nitrates are very high. That in itself isn't bad, but the resulting drop in pH is dangerous. Not because it can hurt the fish, but because when you do a large water change, the fish will experience a large swing in pH rapidly.... and [i[that[/i] is very bad. So, that's why I recommend very small water changes on a very frequent basis.
(This is similar to an acclimation process. The fish can tolerate larger changes in pH, hardness, etc. IF (and only if) they are given a period of time to acclimate themselves. When introducing new fish to a tank, this is done by slowly adding tank water into the container with the new fish, until the overwhelming majority of the water the fish is in is tank water. Then and only then are the fish released into the tank.)
You are doing the same thing in this tank, but instead of releasing the fish, you are just going to leave them in the tank. The only problem with just removing the water and over the course of several hours filling it up, maybe a gallon or so at a time, is that the filter and heater would have to be off for the entire time. I would say that a series of smaller water changes over the next few days (not more than 20%) would give the fish the time they need to acclimate to the "new" parameters and then you could probably just revert to a change every week (assuming that the tests continue to show zero ammonia and nitrite).
Does that make sense?
If you put this into your tank, the filter should be able to deal with it assuming you have a high enough flow rate in your tank.
Sorry. I had to leave, but wanted to give you some feedback. Basically in the nitrogen cycle, ammonia is produced by the fish, that ammonia is processed into nitrite by bacteria, which is later processed by other bacteria into nitrate. If you are getting zeros in the ammonia reading and the nitrite reading, there is no way that the nitrate is also zero. It just CAN'T be accurate. That test being by far the most complicated (I had trouble with it too in the past), I assume there are high nitrates.
Secondly, the nitrates in the tank builds up as nitric acid. This would drop your pH. Depending on the buffering capacity of your tank, how well it can cope with nitric acid before the pH is actually affected. BUT, if all this is happening, chances are good that the tank is actually cycled, but that the nitrates are very high. That in itself isn't bad, but the resulting drop in pH is dangerous. Not because it can hurt the fish, but because when you do a large water change, the fish will experience a large swing in pH rapidly.... and [i[that[/i] is very bad. So, that's why I recommend very small water changes on a very frequent basis.
(This is similar to an acclimation process. The fish can tolerate larger changes in pH, hardness, etc. IF (and only if) they are given a period of time to acclimate themselves. When introducing new fish to a tank, this is done by slowly adding tank water into the container with the new fish, until the overwhelming majority of the water the fish is in is tank water. Then and only then are the fish released into the tank.)
You are doing the same thing in this tank, but instead of releasing the fish, you are just going to leave them in the tank. The only problem with just removing the water and over the course of several hours filling it up, maybe a gallon or so at a time, is that the filter and heater would have to be off for the entire time. I would say that a series of smaller water changes over the next few days (not more than 20%) would give the fish the time they need to acclimate to the "new" parameters and then you could probably just revert to a change every week (assuming that the tests continue to show zero ammonia and nitrite).
Does that make sense?
Sorry you lost a shrimp... 
