Our Fish Keep Dying!

[millym]

hi
yes i agree with d3tained, you might be leaving it too long & the waste is building up which is why you have nitrite, the way your cleaning your filter is exactly whats recommended so dont see any probs there. im sure its just that your not doing water changes often enough & not enough water. id increase it to at least fortnightly at worse( weekly is better but i know can be hard to fit into a busy life) & do about 25% out when you do it. keep a close eye on nitrites when you change your regime & should make a difference & hopefully help your fish survive & be healthy
good luck

 

[Littlelady]

Another thing to watch, is that you only clean out one sponge at a time in the filter, so when the yellow button goes down (sounds like a fluval filter) then clean only one of the sponges in some tank water, then a week or so later clean the other sponge. This way you make sure that there are still sufficient bacteria left in the filter. The bacteria that build up and live in the sponges are the right amont to deal with the waste produced by your fish, so you can imagine that if you clean both sponges at the same time and thus remove a lot of the bacteria, there wouldn't be enough left and your tank would probably have to go through a mini-cycle to re-establish the bacteria colony!