Are you using paper test strips? If you don't have a liquid-reagent based test kit then you should probalby start changing out at least 50% of the water daily until you can get your hands on the right kit. Let us know and we can advise you on kits.
If you have a liquid kit then the goal is to never let ammonia or nitrite(NO2) get above 0.25ppm before you can change out more water. Each time you change water you need to use conditioner of course and you need to roughly match the temperature. Let's say you want to get 8 hours of sleep or need to be out of the house 8 hours, in that case your goal would be that when your got back and tested, the max these toxins would have risen to would 0.25ppm and then you'd water change again and get it back closer to zero ppm. Hope that makes sense.
Ammonia, even in small amounts, causes permanent gill damage and nitrite(NO2) causes permanent damage to the hemoglobin molecules in the fish blood, which leads to suffocation of cells, first resulting in nerve damage. So keeping the concentration of these two problem chemicals as low as possible becomes the overriding urgency when you don't have a working biofilter, as in your case.
One good thing about this exercise is that it imprints in your brain the miracle of the biofilter, which is at the core of the hobby, and serves to let us keep these beautiful little tanks in our homes day in and day out without having to be changing water all the time like nature is doing out in the huge water environments where these fish come from!
~~waterdrop~~
