You need to accept the fact that your readings cannot possibly be accurate. This is based on chemistry.
Using API tests, here is what happens in the absence of live plants.
1 ppm of ammonia can be turned into 2.55 ppm of nitrite at the most. This has to do with the atomic weights of the elements involved. So work backwards and your nitrite readings are not in line with your ammonia readings. And your ammonia readings are not in line with the fact you have live plants.
Then there is the fact that ammonia in a tank cannot remain at a constant level for days on end without using some fancy equipment to make this happen. If fish are making ammonia in a completely uncycled tank, ammonia levels must rise. If there are any ammonia bacteria at all, they will multiply with excess ammonia. When they do, ammonia should stop rising, level out and then drop. Leveling out is not a long process- a day or two.
Next, no matter what the manufacturers tell us, the bacteria mostly use NH3 not NH4. Some are able to utilize NH4 but in a much less efficient manner. So using ammonia detoxifiers will slow a cycle and overdosing them will slow it greatly. This is easy to see if you ever have the pH in a cycling tank drop towards 6.5 or lower. The reason is at those levels there is minimal NH3. In a tank with a real 8 ppm of total ammonia which is at 78F and a pH of 6.0, NH3 is only .0048 ppm and NH4 is 7.9952 ppm. Push that pH to 7.0 and the NH3 is .048 ppm (almost crossing the red line at .05 ppm). Raise the pH to 8.0 and NH3 will be .4566 and your fish will mostly all be dead pretty soon.
The more "junk" you add to a tank to try and deal with the problem, the worse off you will be. Once one can be certain that ammonia levels in a tank are unsafe for the fish (and this is not just any reading of ammonia), then the best course of action is a water change to lower the concentration of ammonia to where it is "safe." This way the bacteria keep getting fed well and will multiply. Bacteria multiplying is what will fix the problem. For high nitrite, chloride in the water is the solution.
All of this is for cases involving cycling issues, It doesn't matter if one is cycling a brand new tank or if one has trashed/lost most of their bacteria in an established tank. That is not the same thing as an established tank suddenly having ammonia when one has done nothing to cause it. In such cases the cause if from within the tank such as something dying and rotting unseen.
As soon as you noticed that the fish were struggling, you should have tested for ammonia, and if you got a reading, tested for nitrite as well. This has to be done before you change any water or add something like ammo lock or anything else that detoxifies ammonia. If you cannot measure the problem, you cannot track it and figure out what is going on and how to fix it.
So I will say this one last time, I have no clue what is going on in your tank because you cannot provide any meaningful numbers that would permit this. The reason is you cannot get an accurate reading of what is going on. So I will give you one last suggestion and you can follow it or not as you choose.
You need to reset your tank. Change as much water as you can. At least 75% and more if possible. Dechlor the water using the normal dosage, DO NOT OVERDOSE - DO NOT ADD AMMO LOCK. Wait about 10 minutes and test for ammonia, you should be able to get a fairly accurate reading before the ammonia detoxifiers make this impossible. This will give you a baseline reading. Check the product information for your dechlor to see how long it will persist in the water. A product like SeaChem Prime will dissipate after a day or so. other products will persist until they have been used up. So depending on the ammonia load produced by the fish it can be a day or a week.
Hopefully, you can get Prim (or similar) and use that if you don't already. That will let you test again fairly soon and get good numbers. When you test the second time where ammonia is vs the initital test will give us a way to know how much ammonia is being created and not handled. Knowing this will then permit us to take the most appropriate next step.
The best way to know there is something wrong in a tank is to let the fish "tell" you. Look for abnormal behavior such as fish hiding, being lethargic, not eating, gasping at the surface or swimming erratically. Such things always override test results as an indicator of issues.
If you decide to follow my advice, post your test result in this thread. Indicate how much water you changed (%) and what the ammonia and nitrite levels were when you tested very soon after you refilled. Also list the dechlor brand you are using. Once this is done I can suggest the next step. Also give us an idea of what level of planting you have in the tank- light, moderate or heavy. Also what level of lighting- low, moderate or high. Finally, list any other additives you use for anything especially the plants. Plants matter because they use ammonia and do so much faster than bacteria.
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