New Tank, Few Q's

[Tank88]

Hello People

Ive recently acquired a fish tank from a friend of a friend. The tank is a Aqua One Aquience Corner 1000C 220l (48g). Its been set up and running for just over a week now but he gave me the fish with the tank in about 20 litres of water from the original set up. The external filter is a TetraTec ex700 and he left all the media in it from his set up which he had for 2 years. I filled the tank up and treated it with API Stress Coat and de-clorinator and had it running for about 10 hours and then my mate let me down as he was going to put the fish in his tank until mine was set up. As it was late evening i had no other place to store the fish and didnt think that they would make it through the night so i had to put them in the tank. They are still fine now but did a water test and the PH was 7.6 and the ammonia was 0.25. Does this require me to do the daily water changes to reduce the ammonia level?
Also i have in the tank 1 plec, 1 BN catfish, 2 tin foil barbs, 1 banded rainbow and 2 chinese algue eaters. What other fish can i look to adding in the future, if any as the AquaAdvisor said that the tank is over stocked?

Thanks for taking the time to read!

any advise would be much appreciated!

 

[the_lock_man]

The short answer is yes, you do need to do a water change to get that ammonia level down. You will also need to test for nitrite. Did the filter media dry out at all?

 

[Tank88]

No worries got it planned for later. No it didnt dry up was only disconnected for about 3 hours so should be fine. Thanks for the advise

 

[the_lock_man]

The reason I asked, as you probably gathered, is that if the media dried out, the bacteria would have died, so you'd be into a full-on fish-in cycle. If it was kept in a bag of water, then you wouldn't have had any bacteria die off in 3 hours (or at least only negligible amounts) so your filter media should be able to handle the waste from your fish - in which case you shouldn't see any ammonia.

It may well be that the stress of the move caused them to produce more ammonia than usual, so hopefully as they settle into their new home, you won't find any more ammonia issues.

 

[Tank88]

Great stuff. Didnt think about the fish getting stressed because a couple of them have been hiding but have gradually come out of the woodwork! thanks again