What The Hell?!?!

[KraKen]

I started cycling my tank 4 weeks ago and for a while it was coming along normally, I got my nitrite spike in a little more than a week and my bacteria were processing over 20ml of ammonia each day so I stopped testing for it. But my nitrites still havn't gone away and now I have a ammonia reading is of the scale as well!

What happened?!

How can I fix this?!

 

[rdd1952]

You need to do a large water change to get the ammonia back to where you know how high it is. You didn't say what size tank you had but generally 1ml will raise 5 gallon of waer to about 5ppm so based on that, 20ml would be about right for a 100 gallon tank. It could be that you got a mini stall and then overloading the bacteria every day without testing stalled everything. That's just a possibility. Just do a water change of 75 to 90 percent so you will know what your levels actually are.

 

[KraKen]

My tank is a 20 gal.

When I stopped testing I also reduced the amount of ammonia to 10ml, could that have anything to do with it?

Also, I can clearly see bacteria covering everything in the tank, is this normal?

 

[rdd1952]

I would think 10ml would be way too much ammonia for a 10 gallon tank. Normally it would take about 2ml to raise it to about 5ppm. I only used about 7 or 8 ml per dose on my 75 gallon tank. I imagine you overloaded the bacteria and they stopped processing ammonia (and possibly nitrite too) and died off so you may be back to square one. The only way to tell is to get the levels to where you know what they are and then see if they are dropping as they should.

As for seeing the bacteria, what you are seeing is algae or fungus but not bacteria. There is no way they would ever be visible to the naked eye. Besides that, the vast majoity of the nitrifying bacteria would be present in the filer, not on other tems in the tank.

 

[KraKen]

Ok, so I killed all my bacteria

I just did about a 60% water change

I looked at the stuff in my tank under a microscope but I couldn't make out individual cells so I still don't know what it is, however it's not algae since it's white