RandomWiktor
Rabid Betta Activist
[This question regards a 75g tank with two 7-inch goldfish. It had a fishless cycle sucessfully performed. The filter is a canister filter rated for tanks up to 200g. There is proper aeration with a bubbler rated for tanks up to 100g. Partial water changes are performed weekly. Presently, ALL of the water stats are in check except for the ammonia.]
I recently introduced my two goldfish (one at a time over the course of a few days to avoid a spike) to my new, cycled 75g aquarium. All was going well until I got too wrapped up in schoolwork and let my mom take over thier once-daily feeding of a mix of Zupreme and Mazuri Koi pellets. I told her exactly how much to give (which is very little since they are calorie dense foods), but she clearly fed much more, because I noticed them gasping at the surface and found that the ammonia was absolutely off the charts - almost at 6.0! - after less than a week since thier last cleaning with her feeding them. All this week, we've been doing 25% water changes 2-3 times a day while simultaneously fasting them and upping the aeration. We have the ammonia down to .25, which is still too high. But the thing is.... it won't get lower. For about 4 days its been sitting there at .25, even though they aren't being fed, and we are doing 25% water changes twice daily. We're getting very fed up; we've probably changed the amount of gallonage in the tank about 3 times over with all of these stupid, time consuming water changes and still the ammonia is too high. Frankly, its stressing out the fish to do all of this cleaning, so today I did a 50% water change with the hopes that it will lower the ammonia. I haven't tested just yet since I literally did it a few minutes ago, but if it is still high after this, I don't know what the heck I'm going to do.
So my question is this. Is it possible that ammonia is trapped in the filter media, which is why we can't seem to get rid of all of it? I mean, it seems that after changing this much water, it should definately be at 0 by now. It doesn't make sense that it would be trapped there since its supposed to just dissolve into the water, but I can't think of any other solution.
I recently introduced my two goldfish (one at a time over the course of a few days to avoid a spike) to my new, cycled 75g aquarium. All was going well until I got too wrapped up in schoolwork and let my mom take over thier once-daily feeding of a mix of Zupreme and Mazuri Koi pellets. I told her exactly how much to give (which is very little since they are calorie dense foods), but she clearly fed much more, because I noticed them gasping at the surface and found that the ammonia was absolutely off the charts - almost at 6.0! - after less than a week since thier last cleaning with her feeding them. All this week, we've been doing 25% water changes 2-3 times a day while simultaneously fasting them and upping the aeration. We have the ammonia down to .25, which is still too high. But the thing is.... it won't get lower. For about 4 days its been sitting there at .25, even though they aren't being fed, and we are doing 25% water changes twice daily. We're getting very fed up; we've probably changed the amount of gallonage in the tank about 3 times over with all of these stupid, time consuming water changes and still the ammonia is too high. Frankly, its stressing out the fish to do all of this cleaning, so today I did a 50% water change with the hopes that it will lower the ammonia. I haven't tested just yet since I literally did it a few minutes ago, but if it is still high after this, I don't know what the heck I'm going to do.
So my question is this. Is it possible that ammonia is trapped in the filter media, which is why we can't seem to get rid of all of it? I mean, it seems that after changing this much water, it should definately be at 0 by now. It doesn't make sense that it would be trapped there since its supposed to just dissolve into the water, but I can't think of any other solution.
