New Tank Reading

[fisknik]

Hi everyone,

My tank is approximately 6 weeks old - it is 20litres
I have 2 Corys doras, 7 Neon Tetras and 2 x Balloon Mollys, 3-6 small snails

After having a huge ammonia spike and severe cloudiness -
One of my Mollies died. I purchased a Nutrafin testing kit.


Using the Nutrafin testing kit my tank (about 5 weeks old) readings
PH = 7 | Ammonia NH3 = 7.3 | Nitrite NO2 = 3.3 | Nitrate NO3 = 50-110 - ARGHHHH

I knew I was in trouble so I resorted to a series of 7 days of 30% water changes on a daily basis (based on reading some of the posts on the forum)
I also pulled out all my plants, decoration shells and castle ornament


NOW my measurements (7 days later)
PH = 6.5 | Ammonia NH3 = 2.4 | Nitrite NO2 = 0.1 | Nitrate NO3 = 5.0 - Huge Improvement
New smaller plant (Amazon Sword) with remaining fish


I am doing 20% changes of water every 3-4 days


How can I get my Ammonia Level to zero?
Do you think my Nitrogen cycle is working?



Nic

P.S Fantastic forum - I have got heaps out of it

 

[Gvilleguy]

Hi Nic, welcome to the forum! You will need to step up your water changes to get the ammonia and nitrite readings as low as possible. I would start with daily 50% and see if that helps. If they do not get down to 0.25 or less it is okay to do larger changes.

 

[Essjay]

Your levels are also being caused by the tank being hugely overstocked. For a fish-in cycle (what you are doing) you start with very few fish. The fish you have make the tank well overstocked for even a mature filter.
Corydoras - too big, unless they are pygmy cories - and need to be in a shoal of 6.
Neon tetras - need a longer tank
Mollies - get far too big for a tank your size.

To be honest, just about the only fish suitable would be one betta (siamese fighting fish). Just that, nothing else. You would be much better off taking the fish you have now back to the shop, and doing a fishless cycle - which wouldn't take long to finish as it's already had a head start. Then get a betta. Or possibly a shoal of ember tetras instead of the betta.

 

[waterdrop]

Agree with essjay - you are in an emergency situation. These fish may need mulitple large water changes (possibly more than one per day at first) where the water is gravel-siphoned out as far down as allows the fish to still have a tiny bit of swimming room before you add the replacement water (be careful that the gravel siphon cylinder doesn't hurt a fish as the water level gets lower.) The reason is that ammonia or nitrite more than about 0.25ppm is very, very stressful, much more so than water changes. The levels you are reporting can kill fish pretty quickly.

The return tap water needs to be treated with condition. I'd dose it at 1.5x to 2x (not more than 2x whatever the instructions say.) It also needs to be roughly temperature matched (you can use warm and cold tap water and use your hand to match with a cup of water from the tank.) Luckily these kinds of "big" water changes are far easier to do with a small tank.

As stated, you have a tank volume problem. I have a quarantine tank that's slightly larger than your tank and I would almost never put more than maybe 5 neon tetras in it, and then only for a month or so to quarantine them prior to moving them to a main tank.

This is not a big deal, we see it a lot as when you are new to the hobby you have no idea how many fish to buy and of course the shops just want to sell as many as they can possibly talk you in to buying. It presents a bit of a problem in that you have to see whether you can get a shop to take them back or can find someone on the web willing to take all or some of them for free or a friend or something. The ideal plan is to re-home all of them and perform a fishless cycle but there is also the option of re-homing most of them and then performing a fish-in cycle. Trying to fish-in cycle would be a very difficult proposition unless you were home-bound or something and this were your primary focus, so kind of ridiculous for most people.

If you decided to reduce the fish down to fish-in cycling load, it would be good to consider that the corys and tetras usually apprecieate more soft, acid water, whereas the molly's usually perfer water with very high mineral content, meaning usually very hard water. Depending on your particular local water, this might help with the decisions. The members here are great, they'll keep helping and helping, so I'm sure you'll get it worked out.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[fisknik]

Thanks heaps guys.

we purchased the tank as a Christmas gift for the kids but I am now starting to get hooked into the serious side.
OK I will start with the daily changes asap.

If I wanted to keep the number of fish that I have - what size tank would you recommend?

Is there a fish to tank calculator I can refer to?

Thanks again

Nick

 

[nophtosh]

Thanks heaps guys.

we purchased the tank as a Christmas gift for the kids but I am now starting to get hooked into the serious side.
OK I will start with the daily changes asap.

If I wanted to keep the number of fish that I have - what size tank would you recommend?

Is there a fish to tank calculator I can refer to?

Thanks again

Nick

Hey Nick, sorry to hear about what's going on. I'd say something a little closer to 100 liters should be what you'd need. Also, check out

(sorry, it won't let me post the link), it's proved very helpful to me as I'm currently setting up my own tank.

 

[Gvilleguy]

I find that site (to which you cannot post the link - a_q_advisor) is a great starting point for beginners. I just checked my current year old stock level against that site and I'm at 98%, which is what I estimated in my own experience of having the tank.

 

[fisknik]

Hey Nophtosh and Gvilleguy,

Thanks heaps. I will check it out.

What a great community!!


Nic

 

[fisknik]

Hey Guys,


remember my tank
23/2/2011 it was
PH = 7 | Ammonia NH3 = 7.3 | Nitrite NO2 = 3.3 | Nitrate NO3 = 50-110 - ARGHHHH

I knew I was in trouble so I resorted to a series of 7 days of 30% water changes on a daily basis (based on reading some of the posts on the forum)
I also pulled out all my plants, decoration shells and castle ornament


5/3/2011
PH = 6.5 | Ammonia NH3 = 2.4 | Nitrite NO2 = 0.5 | Nitrate NO3 = 10 ( Huge Improvement but not enough)

After

• daily water changes of between 20-40%
• Changing over to Nutrafin Cycle and Aquaplus
• Adding an extra Bio Noodle to my filter (and pouring some Cycle over the noodles) (and leaving my filter off for a few hours)
• lots of careful vacumming over the gravel
  

{drum roll.....}


15/3/11
PH = 7.0 | Ammonia NH3 = 0.0 | Nitrite NO2 = 0.3 | Nitrate NO3 = 20.0

- I feel like Rocky Balboa - I did it Adrian!


Very happy - NH3 has been at zero for 3 days - I think Nitrite is lowering and Nitrate is rising. The Fish are loving it. My Albino CoryDora dash-dances across the tank

FishNik



Checkout My Graph (I used Google Charts - cool!)

FishNik's Tank

 

[Gvilleguy]

Great job, Fishnik! That's how you do a recovery.

 

[waterdrop]

Really glad to hear that fisknik. Should be double-zeros very soon. WD