Testing Ammonia Help

[chigwellhammer]

Just tested my ammonia and its 0.25ppm

What should i do?

 

[Ch4rlie]

Are you in process of cycling your tank or is this ammonia reading from an established tank?

More information would be good.

But really, an established tank and filter should process ammonia quickly.

If you do have fish in your tank and while 0.25 ppm ammonia is not a lot and fish can tolerate this for a while, it's not panic time yet IMO.

More details will be required before can give any reasonable advice, the more details / information you can give, the better.

 

[chigwellhammer]

It was cycled a long time ago but kind of got left alone and thats that

Yes there are fish in the tank

 

[Blobfish]

Have you tested for pH, nitrite and nitrate?  If so what are those readings?

 

[TwoTankAmin]

If you use a dechlor which contains an ammonia detoxifier or an ammonia detoxifier itself, this can cause false positive on an ammonia kit. if you are using suc a product is is important that you test soon ad=fter adding such products to get a good reading. If you wait a day sometimes two, it can give false results.
 
A reading of .25 ppm of ammonia will only be a problem if you have a pH of 8.5 of above and your temp is 80F (27C) or higher. Ammonia becomes more harmful the higher the pH and temp of the water.
 
In order for your ammonia reading to be real it would have to have a source. Did you add a bunch of fish lately? Has a fish gone missing and could be dead and decomposing in some unseen place? Have you done a huge vacuuming or changed your filter media recently?
 
Ammonia is followed by nitrite. In an established tank you see neither because the ammonia and nitrite bacs are in the proper balance, If you get ammonia that is real, then you should get an even higher reading for nitrite as well.

 

[chigwellhammer]

PH - 7.6
Nitrite - 2ppm
Nitrate - 0ppm

Lucky i checked jeez!!

 

[TwoTankAmin]

Don't panic. the ammonia is low enough not to worry. The nitrite can be handled with the addition of a bit of salt. I need to know your tank size and I can let you know how much plain table salt you need to add. it will be a very small amount that wont harm anything but ill help with nitrite while it waits to be processed.

 

[chigwellhammer]

96lite according to the calculator above
Also i was told last night to do a watef change today, Should i do roughly 25% ?

 

[TwoTankAmin]

If you choose to deal with the situation via water changes, which I believe not to be needed yet, then ignore all of the following and just do whatever the other person making the suggestions tells you and I will stop offering my advice. It is usually important to try and listen to just oen source for advice. That way you know if it was good or not so good by what follows. Trying to patch together disparate advice from several sources usually lands one up in deeper dodo than where they started.
 
To block 2 ppm of nitrite you need 20 mg/l of chloride. (10 times the concentration of chloride than nitrite)
 
96 litres of water means 96 x 20 mg = 1920 mg/1000 = 1.92 gm. I have weighed this out on a triple beam Ohaus scale and it fills 1/4 level teaspoon.
 
Since salt is roughly 2/3 chloride, you need 1.5 times the salt. 1/4 teaspoon x 1.5 = 3/8 of a teaspoon of salt.
 
Use plain old table salt. Do not put dry salt directly into the tank. Remove some tank water to a clean glass container, add the salt to this to dissolve it and then pour it into the tank spreading it around the surface as you pour.
 
Bear in mind you must keep testing for nitrite since, if it rises, then more salt is required. But also you test it to know when it is gone. Once things zero back out, you remove the salt from the water via water changes.
 
I am also assuming your ammonia level is staying at .25 ppm or else has gone to 0?

 

[chigwellhammer]

Bit scared doing this salt method never done this before!

I'm happy to take all the advice i can get so thank you twotank

 

[TwoTankAmin]

chig- the use of chloride to block nitrite has been done for years. there are toms of research on this. In fact the scientific community would tell you that no study on nitrite has any value if it fails to include the effects/presence of chloride.
 
You might want to peruse these
 
http/www.agriculturejournals.cz/publicFiles/61325.pdf
 
or this, which is a bit less technical
 
http/www.ca.uky.edu/wkrec/NitritePonds.pdf

 

[chigwellhammer]

Thanks again twotank, if i do the salt trick when should i test the water again for nitrite?

 

[TwoTankAmin]

At least daily or even every 12 hours. You want to know if either ammonia or nitrite levels are rising, falling or staying the same. The reason you want to test is to keep the fish safe. If the numbers are rising tesing more often is a good idea. When they are falling you can space tests out more.
 
2 ppm of nitrite takes only .75 ppm of ammonia to create it. So, the odds are your ammonia is on the way down and the nitrite should be following not far behind.
 
The more important question is, from where did the ammonia come? You want to insure this problem does not happen again. Did anything die in the tank? Did you change media or do a deep gravel vac.? Did you add a bunch of new fish? Did you kill off algae? Etc.?

 

[chigwellhammer]

Waterr change last night

Ammonia still 0.25
Nitrite is about 1 by the looks of it, Bit hard to tell