New To Tff And In Need Of Some Serious Help

[pitufita]

So after doing some heavy reading on this forum along with many other ones I realized that I know close to nothing about starting a new aquarium (resulting in the death of many fish which I cared about dearly and which also cost me a pretty penny) So this is my story


I previously owned a 20 gallon tank which was heavily populated with an assortement of fish after many months of owning and caring for these fish they started to drop dead like flies. The first to go was my female pipe fish, then the male and then another 11 fish. All in the matter of a week. I then visited my local fish store anbd they advised me to by a water test kit, and that the first thing I should test for was ammonia ( I had explained to them that the fish were at the top swimming around frantically gasping for air ... that is of course before most of them died). So I did and when I got home I tested the water and sure enough the ammonia level was up the roof( It turned emerald green almost instantly). Long story short I spent to weeks in a panic trying to save my fish changing the water daily and investing money on water treatments that claimed to remove the ammonia or alteast convert it to a non toxic form. After spending all kinds of money trying to save my babies I had failed to save them all and was only able to save 5 which I temporarily moved to my mothers 20 gallon tank. Thinking that maybe the ammonia problem was due to an over populated tank I ran out and bought myself a brand new 55 gallon.

Part 2
My new 55 gallon
So I get home set everything up and leave it running for a week like the guy at the fish store had told me to. Used all the water treatment they told me to use (bio-support and water conditioner) Now a month later and 3 elephant nose,1 blue gourami, 1 gold gourami, 2 ID sharks, 2 powder blue gourami (the female has now been quarantined due to some freaky bite-like mark right above her eye..I think she may be sick or something), 1 glass cat fish, and 2 golden algae eaters later I am once again facing the same problem.HIGH LEVELS OF AMMONIA! I must add that I have 2 filters running on my tank I thought maybe it would help keep the water cleaner ( clearly I was wrong). I did not test the water for the first 3 weeks since I did not have it with me ( left it at my moms place) when i finally got it back I decided to test the water which as I already mentioned gave me a severely high level of ammonia. Tested it for nitrite got a reading of 0, tested it for nitrate got a reading of 10ppm the ammonia read over 4ppm.
This is my story and the next thing I have to say is HELP!!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE HELP ME SAVE MY BABIES!!! I'm lost and dont know where to start . Been doing 25% water changes ever other day using ammo lock, prime and bio-support and still I get an ammonia reading of over 4ppm. What am I doing wrong, what should I be doing???

 

[fishafanatic]

this is my opinion and i am not an expert or anything but you sound like you really need help. first of all did you know about fishless cycling? there is a post about somewhere...but first of all you should have started with that...you said ur mother had a tank, if it has been set up for some time now then you should have gotten a filter cartridge from her filter and your tank would have been instaanlt cycled. as for the fish i am assuming that you hust bought them all in a very short period of time and just put them in there. you had to slowly introduce them in so the bacteria that converts ammonia to non-toxic nitrate. but now i guess that the best thing to do is a 25% water change daily or every other day until the bacteria colonize. to be on the safe side you should wait for what the experts here have to say about it. as you can see i am stil a newb to this and this is all from what i have read..good luck

 

[pitufita]

this is my opinion and i am not an expert or anything but you sound like you really need help. first of all did you know about fishless cycling? there is a post about somewhere...but first of all you should have started with that...you said ur mother had a tank, if it has been set up for some time now then you should have gotten a filter cartridge from her filter and your tank would have been instaanlt cycled. as for the fish i am assuming that you hust bought them all in a very short period of time and just put them in there. you had to slowly introduce them in so the bacteria that converts ammonia to non-toxic nitrate. but now i guess that the best thing to do is a 25% water change daily or every other day until the bacteria colonize. to be on the safe side you should wait for what the experts here have to say about it. as you can see i am stil a newb to this and this is all from what i have read..good luck

Yes I read about fishless cycling which was my reason for joining. Ppl here seem to know what they are talking about and I REALLY need some expert help. A little too late for the fishless cycle. Im hoping somebody here will be able to help me with my tank in its current condition. Thanks for the luck I really need it!

 

[groovitudedude]

Actually, you can get through this hobby fine without test kits, but they do help a considerable amount, especially for people just starting the hobby. Cycling is extremely important.

 

[Mikaila31]

IMO test kits are a nessecity, IDK how you can get by w/o them. As you get more experienced you may not need to use them as often, but their is never a point where you can go without them.

As for the tanks you will want to do a large 50% water change and try to bring the ammonia down to .25. The best thing would be to return the fish to the store as soon as possible the gouramis are not the hardiest of fish and most likely won't survive the cycle. The elephant noses and sharks get huge(an I mean huge) they won't fit in your tank. Its not really fair to put the fish through the cycle, since it will cause life long damage to the fish. Once they are gone you can do a fishless cycle and start over again.

 

[OldMan47]

No point in arguing about test kits right now. If you have ammonia at a whole 4 ppm, you need to do several large water changes, maybe 50% each, until you get the ammonia under control at less than 0.25 ppm. Mikaila is very right about that. When you get it under control, you can then go back to maybe 25% daily changes if you don't have your own test kit. If you do have a kit, you can judge how much water you really need to change to keep your water under control. When you start to see nitrites, and you will, you again need to keep up with the water changes to control nitrites at less than 0.25 ppm. When all is said and done, there will be some water change rate that will keep your nitrates at less than about 20 ppm and it will be fairly consistent. Once you know how much that is, you can basically not test much until you add a fish, change what you are feeding, change how much you are feeding or do anything else to affect your chemistry. At that point it would be best to test and see how you are doing.

 

[waterdrop]

Mikaila and Oldman47 are right, what you need right now are water changes and probably lots of them!

Hi pitufita and welcome to TFF! They have clearly spelled out some of the needs already and I'm going to join in and add some of the usual stuff that gets repeated here to a lot for beginners. If you already know these, I'm sorry.

Water changes are performed by siphoning off your existing tank water. Usually the end of the siphon in the tank has a larger tube enabling it to be used as a gravel cleaner. You move and disturb areas of the gravel and fish waste and debris are sucked out along with the water. This is especially good in your case because any debris removed means less ammonia will be created in the tank. When you add fresh tap water back into the tank it will need to treated with a dechlorination/dechloramination product (like Prime or Stress Coat or others) and you should roughly match the temperature just using your skin to judge. You will be changing half the water in your big 55G and that is a lot of water. Are you aware of hoses like the Python that can make this process faster and easier? The nicest thing about these is using the same hose to drain and then having it directly attached to a faucet for a fast refill. You can just dump half the required amount of your dechlor product directly into the tank at the beginning of the refill and then the other half near the end or just after. You can perform another 50% water change after only one hour (but more about that later when we talk about test kits.)

There are many weeks of good preparations that can go into readying a tank for live fish. You have stumbled on a great forum where you can learn about all this. Unfortunately, but typically, you didn't know about this and already have fish and thus are in the process of a "fish-in" cycle. OK, so water changes are your first and most important step in a fish-in cycle process. Oldman47 has explained some of the "why" already. The next priority is to get out to your pet shop and find a test kit. You've already put lots of money into a large tank and even two filters, but unfortunately you couldn't have known that a little $30 test kit was the most important purchase of all. Hagen and others make good kits. I and many others here use the API Freshwater Master Test Kit. Its very important that it be based on bottles of liquid test reagents. The test strips that are sold are not worth the paper they are printed on. Bring the kit home and learn to use it by testing your tap water several times and writing down the results. Next test your tank water. Obviously your immediate concern is ammonia and nitrite. Ammonia burns fish gills and Nitrite (NO2) competes with oxygen in the bloodstream and suffocates the fish. Amounts even smaller than the tests can detect are bad, so your goal is to use water changes to get both these poisons down to test levels of zero as much as possible.

As alluded to above, once you have a test kit and can measure the results of a water change, you can decide if things are still very bad (1-4ppm) and do another 50% change after an hour, or when you start detecting only 0.25ppm or very low numbers like that, you can wait until the next morning (some sort of twice a day pattern) and then less and less. After you've done a bunch of water changes and tested and get a feel for how fast the ammonia and nitrite start to come back up (fish respiration, fish waste, excess food and plant debris create the ammonia) you will get a pattern going as oldman47 has described. Once you settle into the pattern you may find one night, as you rest from a water change, that you want to know what the heck you are trying to accomplish by "cycling."

That's where all the great articles pinned at the top of the forum come in. Read as much as you can - its fascinating! Knowledge of all this was the one major thing you lacked when buying all that equipment, so gaining it will feel great! A short version of the answer is that when you bought those nice filters you were buying a raw piece of machinery that doesn't really work until its been "cycled." Two different species of bacteria need to grow and attach themselves to the media in the filters. Even though you will be doing water changes, enough ammonia will be circulating through the filters to provide the first population, the AOBs (Ammonia Oxidizing Bacteria) with food for population growth. Eventually they will produce enough of their product, the Nitrite, and the second population, the NOBs (you can figure that one out) will begin to grow and process the Nitrite into Nitrate (NO3) which is normally removed by regular weekly water changes. Nitrate is not as dangerous to fish, so we have filters to quickly and automatically process the two deadly things and then the Nitrates can hang around until the end of the week. It may take only a week or it may take many weeks for your filter to "cycle" and become the automatic poison remover that you need (and that every beginner thinks it should be when brought home from the shop!) How will you know when its ready? Once you can go two whole days without detecting ammonia or nitrite and having to do a water change, you can consider yourselves "cycled" and slowly let down on the urgency of your testing.

Whew! (obviously I only write these at moments when I have no life!) Also I know how much fun it is to read an answer written back at my personal situation. Anyway, hope you guys get back on and see it or that some other newcomer has fun reading it.

~~waterdrop~~
ps. as always, TFF members please feel free to correct my mistakes or miscommunications - much of my info is repeated from reading here on the forum and on the web.

 

[Amunet]

So your mother's 20gallon tank is cycled right? What sort of filter media does it use? If it's a bag or a sponge, buy her some new ones, put them into her filter, and cut off a small portion of her old filter media and then stick that in yours after you've done a largish water change. Don't cut off too much b/c you don't want her tank to suffer any.
I would suggest putting in some new media into her filter and waiting about 2 weeks for the new stuff to get seeded with beneficial bacteria so you would just take the new stuff, but sounds like you need help now.
So yeah, if your mother's tank is nice and mature and healthy, get some of her filter media into your tank. Don't wash it out or anything and make sure it stays wet (with tank water.. don't put it in un-dechlorinated tap) and then plop that piece of media into your filter. Hopefully there will be enough beneficial bacteria on the small piece to get your tank going in the right direction alot quicker.


I really stink at trying to explain things so I apologize if what I said was confusing lol. I'm sure someone else who can explain what I said better will come along

I really hope everything works out!

 

[pitufita]

Mikaila and Oldman47 are right, what you need right now are water changes and probably lots of them!

Hi pitufita and welcome to TFF! They have clearly spelled out some of the needs already and I'm going to join in and add some of the usual stuff that gets repeated here to a lot for beginners. If you already know these, I'm sorry.

Water changes are performed by siphoning off your existing tank water. Usually the end of the siphon in the tank has a larger tube enabling it to be used as a gravel cleaner. You move and disturb areas of the gravel and fish waste and debris are sucked out along with the water. This is especially good in your case because any debris removed means less ammonia will be created in the tank. When you add fresh tap water back into the tank it will need to treated with a dechlorination/dechloramination product (like Prime or Stress Coat or others) and you should roughly match the temperature just using your skin to judge. You will be changing half the water in your big 55G and that is a lot of water. Are you aware of hoses like the Python that can make this process faster and easier? The nicest thing about these is using the same hose to drain and then having it directly attached to a faucet for a fast refill. You can just dump half the required amount of your dechlor product directly into the tank at the beginning of the refill and then the other half near the end or just after. You can perform another 50% water change after only one hour (but more about that later when we talk about test kits.)

There are many weeks of good preparations that can go into readying a tank for live fish. You have stumbled on a great forum where you can learn about all this. Unfortunately, but typically, you didn't know about this and already have fish and thus are in the process of a "fish-in" cycle. OK, so water changes are your first and most important step in a fish-in cycle process. Oldman47 has explained some of the "why" already. The next priority is to get out to your pet shop and find a test kit. You've already put lots of money into a large tank and even two filters, but unfortunately you couldn't have known that a little $30 test kit was the most important purchase of all. Hagen and others make good kits. I and many others here use the API Freshwater Master Test Kit. Its very important that it be based on bottles of liquid test reagents. The test strips that are sold are not worth the paper they are printed on. Bring the kit home and learn to use it by testing your tap water several times and writing down the results. Next test your tank water. Obviously your immediate concern is ammonia and nitrite. Ammonia burns fish gills and Nitrite (NO2) competes with oxygen in the bloodstream and suffocates the fish. Amounts even smaller than the tests can detect are bad, so your goal is to use water changes to get both these poisons down to test levels of zero as much as possible.

As alluded to above, once you have a test kit and can measure the results of a water change, you can decide if things are still very bad (1-4ppm) and do another 50% change after an hour, or when you start detecting only 0.25ppm or very low numbers like that, you can wait until the next morning (some sort of twice a day pattern) and then less and less. After you've done a bunch of water changes and tested and get a feel for how fast the ammonia and nitrite start to come back up (fish respiration, fish waste, excess food and plant debris create the ammonia) you will get a pattern going as oldman47 has described. Once you settle into the pattern you may find one night, as you rest from a water change, that you want to know what the heck you are trying to accomplish by "cycling."

That's where all the great articles pinned at the top of the forum come in. Read as much as you can - its fascinating! Knowledge of all this was the one major thing you lacked when buying all that equipment, so gaining it will feel great! A short version of the answer is that when you bought those nice filters you were buying a raw piece of machinery that doesn't really work until its been "cycled." Two different species of bacteria need to grow and attach themselves to the media in the filters. Even though you will be doing water changes, enough ammonia will be circulating through the filters to provide the first population, the AOBs (Ammonia Oxidizing Bacteria) with food for population growth. Eventually they will produce enough of their product, the Nitrite, and the second population, the NOBs (you can figure that one out) will begin to grow and process the Nitrite into Nitrate (NO3) which is normally removed by regular weekly water changes. Nitrate is not as dangerous to fish, so we have filters to quickly and automatically process the two deadly things and then the Nitrates can hang around until the end of the week. It may take only a week or it may take many weeks for your filter to "cycle" and become the automatic poison remover that you need (and that every beginner thinks it should be when brought home from the shop!) How will you know when its ready? Once you can go two whole days without detecting ammonia or nitrite and having to do a water change, you can consider yourselves "cycled" and slowly let down on the urgency of your testing.

Whew! (obviously I only write these at moments when I have no life!) Also I know how much fun it is to read an answer written back at my personal situation. Anyway, hope you guys get back on and see it or that some other newcomer has fun reading it.

~~waterdrop~~
ps. as always, TFF members please feel free to correct my mistakes or miscommunications - much of my info is repeated from reading here on the forum and on the web.

First off I would like to say thank you for taking the time to write me. And to answer some of your questions I do own and use one of those syphons that you attach to your sink and away it goes on its own ( I love that thing makes water changes sooo much easier) Also I also own the API Fresh water master kit ( my mom had borrowed it, she needs one of her own) cost me $50 tho, one of the best investments I have ever made for my fish considering its how I even realized I had a problem. AS for everything else yourself and everyone else has mentioned I have been doing and for the first time since I detected the problem the ammonia levels are finally dropping. I lost the little card that tells me the levels of ammonia but what I do remember is that emerald green was 4ppm and yellow was 0 ppm. last night when I tested the water it was dark green and this morning when I tested it, it was lime green( MUCH MUCH lighter then the previous tests. As far as my mothers aquarium not quite sure what condition it is in ( my brother isnt the brightest star in the sky) He recently decided to clean it out and rinsed everything off, gravel AND filter inserts with tap water. YES I KNOW .... bad idea. When he told me this I had to explain to him WHY he couldnt and shouldnt do this and that he was harming his fish. We both use Aqua clear filters, the ones that use the 3 diff inserts ( sponge, carbon, and some other thing the box says to use). But like I just mentioned they are no good to me now. I recently visited my local pet store and the guy there suggested I use some Chemi pure thing inside of my filter. Explained something about how it was the same as if he had given me one of the sponges they have had in their aquariums for a long time. This was after I had told him that I was told to go to the pet store and ask for mature filter media.
So far, things are looking up and seems like everything you guys have suggested is working. Im going to continue with the daily water changes and hopefully I will be getting readings of 0ppm sooner then later.

 

[pitufita]

Once again thanks to ALL of you that have responded. You all had great advise which in my opinion is the reason why my babies are doing better now. I know I still have a long road ahead of me as far as a full recovery goes. But Im happy to finally see some improvement after so much had gone wrong. I do know quite a bit about keeping fish(atleast the basics). Thanks to google and the few people who actually know what they are talking about at the pet store and now all of you who have responded to my cry for help. I just clearly did not know enough ( and of course I didnt know the most important part ... the fishless cycle) I had only been told about the fish in cycle. So please do keep adding your comments i need all the help I can get.

I was also wondering does anyone know what that chemi pure thing I bought is. Guy at the pet store was talking to fast so I couldnt understand him. All I got was "this works real good and it WILL deal with your problem" so i bought it. Its some black stuff that comes in a jar and it goes in your filter. Anyone know what Im talking about? if you do, is it any good, does it really work?? what is it and what does it do???

 

[OldMan47]

If you have lost your API instructions or cards, you can view them on line by starting here http/www.americanaquariumproducts.com/Downloads.html