Struggling With Getting Double Zero

[bravehart]

We have a Tetratec AquArt 60l tank which we have had fish in for the last three weeks after completeing a 1 month...ish fishless cycle, but not doing a qualifying week.
We started with 3 male sunset platys and 3 panda corys, 2 more corys were added after 1 week and put some more plants and decorations in after week 2. We have been doing regular water changes and partial water changes whenever the readings required.
First we struggled with a bit of a Nitrite spike....then it seemed to settle again and must admit I had stopped checking for ammonia. Having had 3 successive reading of zero for nitrite, I thought I would just check all 3 and settle back to measuring on a less frequent basis, but tonights readings showed ammonia 0.5, nitrite 0 and nitrate 5.
I'm sure it is something we are probably doing/not doing, but I also wonder if it might be something to do with the filter media. We are using the supplied TT EasyCrystal Filter pack.

Any suggestions welcomed. Tim

 

[stuuk1]

Im new to all of this, but have done alot of reading up on the whole cycling process. What I would recommend doing is a 30% water change every day. Test your water before each change.

Do this every day until you get your first readings of Nitrite 0 and Ammonia 0. Once you get that first initial reading then test everyday without the water changes. Get those readings for 7 days and your cycle is done. If the readings go back up within those 7 days, do another water change.

I cycled my old 48ltr tank and tried to switch the media to my new 240ltr and its going through another mini cycle and im having to water change that everyday to!

 

[waterdrop]

I don't disagree with that. Above advice is ok. Basically you have to just consider youself to be following the fish-in cycling techniques outlined in rabbut's article.

As far as understanding it, its a hard call. The direction you want to go is to just be stubborn and keep changing water and telling yourself that you will out-willpower it. It is possible though that someday you may look back on it and decide that it partly had to do with the filter. I do believe that there's a reason that most of the people doing this a long time have gravitated mostly to large external cannister filters. These filter have large beds of filter media and I think these just prove to be more effective. I've never had much faith in the the thin floss sheets stretched on plastic frames. This is not to say that they can't cycle and work, they do it every day. Its just that I seem to hear more stories of these type filters being involved in more borderline cases. In your case though I just would find it hard to believe its a capacity thing. Its more likely to just be a "not enough colony size" thing still at this point (for whatever reason.)

WD

 

[bravehart]

Thanks for the replies we will keep on with the water changes and hopefully find the equilibrium state soon. Does anyone know if is there any way of putting other filter media in that filter, other than the cartridge they are designed to take?

 

[bravehart]

Thought I might have sorted it when I found one of the new plants had leaves rotting, but stripped the leaves off and still getting ammonia. Would rotting leaves cause ammonia? We will get their in the end.

 

[waterdrop]

Very definately. Decomposing plant matter can be a major contributor (well, at least right up there with other debris) to ammonia production:
Ammonia sources in a running (when fish are in, fish-in or after cycling):
1) respiration product (gills give off ammonia)
2) fish waste
3) excess/leftover fishfood
4) plant debris

numbers 2,3 and 4 are carried out by heterotrophic/saprotrophic bacteria breaking down the higher level organic molecules into smaller ones and ultimately to ammonia(NH3)

~~waterdrop~~

 

[bravehart]

Thanks for the help...it seemes the plant was the main cause of the ammonia. After removing it, we have had double zero for a week now and we are going to reward our efforts by getting some more fish. Tim

 

[waterdrop]

Interesting, I wonder if any of our other drag-out cases were caused by this. Perhaps its a thing we should question more closely in future cases. Thanks Tim!

~~waterdrop~~

 

[JoshuaA]

Very definately. Decomposing plant matter can be a major contributor (well, at least right up there with other debris) to ammonia production:
Ammonia sources in a running (when fish are in, fish-in or after cycling):
1) respiration product (gills give off ammonia)
2) fish waste
3) excess/leftover fishfood
4) plant debris

numbers 2,3 and 4 are carried out by heterotrophic/saprotrophic bacteria breaking down the higher level organic molecules into smaller ones and ultimately to ammonia(NH3)

~~waterdrop~~

This information is relevant to my interests. I love it much more when someone gives a scientific explanation than "it works like that". Fortunately through the few weeks I've been on this forum many to most people have been following up their advice with the scientific reasons behind it.

Ontop of that, throughout my fish in cycle attempt, We had to remove 2/3 plants because they started to wilt in the tank. When I think back the ammonia levels did increase at a slower rate when the plants were removed. However we had one plant that flourished and we split it and repotted it. That never seemed to effect the ammonia levels however the Ich treatment + no light seems to have severely damage these 2 plants (Canadian pond weed I think).

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, we have a very, very difficult time managing the information flow about plants in the beginner section. First of all, most beginners are already overwhelmed with information overload on the cycling and water changing, so they're not really ready to handle more details about the plant topics. Another problem is that once people are adept at plants they find it easy to use larger numbers of healthy plants to help them start a tank, it can even be a better way to start a tank if you're good at it. They are anxious to share this with beginners, which is good, but I feel that despite good information only about a third of beginners find immediate success and the rest, the majority I feel, struggle. It doesn't help that a new tank can be quite devoid of the types of nutrients that a plant needs and of course, during fishless cycling, if one is doing that, there's the algae problem.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[N0body Of The Goat]

I have to confess, the one area I am really worried about is adding too much food for my tank stock at any given time, which could cause an ammonia disaster in the early days of my setup. I'm hoping to get down to my LFS at feeding time and get a feel for the "pinch" needed for six Zebra Danios, which I hope to introduce to my newly planted tank within the next week.

If your tank cycle is stalling, perhaps a suitable sized bottle of something like Tetra SafeStart could help rescue the situation and get the ammonia mini spike resolved?

 

[waterdrop]

I believe adding a bottled bacteria product would be essentially equivalent to dumping in an equal mass of fishfood, its the same thing (fishfood is just dead fish material, bottled bacteria is just dead bacterial cells - both are just complex organic molecules in varying sizes, waiting to be broken down into ammonia by the heterotrophic/saprotrophic bacteria that are ever-present in the water.)

I wouldn't worry too much Goat, its pretty easy to get within reasonable feeding amounts. Just use a little kitchen timer or watch, just like you did for timing your water tests: sprinkle a little flake food on the surface and perhaps grind a bit between thumb and finger just below the surface so that that bit will sink and get the the middle/bottom swimmers better. If they eat it all up, do a little more and so forth such that you don't go past the 3 minute mark. Start with once a day and plan to simply not feed if there's a day of the week you forget. If you have very small fish like neons, you can consider a second small feeding at a different time of day while they are still small.

~~waterdrop~~