Water Stats...advice Plz! Update Help Plz!

[waterdrop]

Correct, your water changes are too "wimpy!" Not only are you correct that you can be changing right down toward the gravel, but that's indeed what you -need- to be doing. The bacteria that you care about are essentially all living in the filter, water changes won't bother them at all, in fact water changes will tend to keep things good for them. With large water changes you do need to use good technique however, with 1.5x or 2x conditioner dosing (to remove chlorine/chloramine and guard against over-chlorination by the water authorities) and you need to do rough temperature matching using your hand, which should keep the temp within about 2 degrees F or so. You can do another water change as soon as an hour after a previous one and often it takes several big ones to kind of get things down near zero and under control, after which maintaining that will seem to be somewhat easier pretty often. But basically, in your situation you'll need 12 hour checks.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[iluvguppies]

thnx wd,

I'm gonna do that now then see how my stats are!

Nikki

PS this is a great website ...just wish I'd found it before I got the fish.....and I really appreciate all the help everyone has given me.

 

[waterdrop]

Should have mentioned in that last post that how far you take the water level down in a large water change is a matter of convenience. You obviously want some space for the fish still (no need to take them out) and sometimes people area able to leave their filter running if they don't go below the intake pipe. Also should mention that you should not dose conditioner -more- than 2x the recommended dosing as that might slow the N-Bac development.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[iluvguppies]

Right, I've done 12 gallon w/c on a 14-15 gallon tank. The stats now are:

Ammonia between 0 and 0.25
nitrites between 0 and 0.25

I use API liquid master test kit. I would say color wise nearer to the 0 but I'm surprised it wasn't definitely 0 with how much water I took out! Is this normal or is something wrong in my tank? I wasn't able to keep filter running but I kept it submerged in tank water and it was only off for about 5mins or so as I already had the dechlor water ready so it was jjust a case of using gravel syphon to empty tank.
I'll do another tonight the same

Nikki

 

[waterdrop]

Yeah, its funny but those poisons seem to have a bit of an affinity for the gravel and filter, so despite a really large change you'll often not not see straight zeros in the followup test. Multiple changes with an hour between will often do it however. Looks like you're where you want to be now and have a good plan.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[iluvguppies]

Update:

Hi,

Since my last post I've upped my water changes to twice a day for 2 days and then for the last 3 w/c over the last 2 days I've done xtra large w/c (instead of 50% I've done 2 x 90-95% and one x 100%).

My results got really bad the time before I did the xtra large w/c...nitrites shot back up to 5 and ammonia got to 1!!!!
After these 2 days of large water changes results tonight stand at:

ammonia 0
nitrites b/n 0 - 0.25

So far this result isn't holding 12hrs later it's high again. Should I keep persevering with these high w/c or does it stress fish too much...is there anything else I should be doing??
I clean gravel EVERY time I do a w/c.
Whilst doing large w/c I keep filter submerged but off...probably for about 5-10mins. I also last time round squeezed out muck fm/cleaned sponges in old tank water before throwing that old water away......have I lost the bacteria...is that why ammonia and nitrite keeps spiking up and down because at one point ammonia was 0 for almost a week whilst nitrites came down steadily??


Thanks for any words of wisdom

I haven't lost any fish after the second day (lost 4 neon tetras on day 2) ....it's now day30 or so and I want to keep it that way so will do whatever it takes no matter how inconvenient.

Nikki

 

[OldMan47]

It sounds to me that you have not had your tank set up long enough to establish a viable bacterial colony in the first place. If you had lower levels for a day or two, I would guess that you got lucky and did not overfeed at all during that time. On day 30, you are very early in a fish-in cycle and may well need to keep doing frequent very large water changes. If you can severely limit the feeding of your fish, always leaving them quite hungry but not starved, it will reduce how much water change is needed until you get decent bacterial colonies established. My guess would be that your filter contains something that the manufacturer says will help you hold down ammonia levels and it has become exhausted and now your bacteria need to try to handle the ammonia load. Since they would have been spared the effort in the past, they are probably not up to the task. The short term fix is lots of big water changes with severely restricted feeding and keep your eye on the water chemistry.

 

[iluvguppies]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I've got a interpet p3 filter that came with the tank...it's got normal sponge + carbon sponge plus ceramic beads for bio filtration. I was worried that I might of washed them away when I cleaned the sponge in the old tank water that I then threw away.
I will contiue with the same strategy as I've outlined above then and see if it pays off. The fish seem active/happy enough. I give them about 5 flakes of food each day ....Is that too much or not enough for 5 guppies and 6 neon tetras? I do worry that I don't feed them enough as they are always "begging" for food when I open the lid on the tank!!!

Nikki

 

[OldMan47]

You are not overfeeding in my estimation. Cleaning your filter sponges when they need it is just something that you must do. As long as you are only rinsing in old tank water, the damage to any biological filter will still be minimal.