What To Do Next?

[Darr3ll]

Also ...not really relevant but kinda relevant, I was on the phone to a friend while looking for the ammonia and i told him what i was doing and why etc...he then told me a story of how he just house-sat for a friend a few months back and while there he decided to "do her a favour" and clean her tank..he said he took EVERYTHING out and put the fish in the sink and then proceeded to wash EVERYTHING including the filter and stones etc in the bath with tap water. He said he then cleaned the tank with fairy liquid and washed it out then put it all back in with warm tap water and in his words "why are you fussing? just chuck em in the tank they will be ok, my friends ones are doing just great!!" LOL

makes you wonder!

If you are in UK, try Boots for household ammonia.. basically the ingredients list can only have ammonia and water on it.

If you are completely stuffed for ammonia, you can use frozen shrimp (the sort one would normally eat), but you'll be working with a lot of guesswork then.

Boots didnt have it..they didnt even know what it was (granted they werent very bright!) ...i tried my local chemist (where i saw barrettine), superdrug, boots and several little hardware/garden/knick knack shops...and barrettine was the only one i saw...i dont want to faff about with dead shrimp to be honest.

you are in the uk
they sell it just been on the
boots site and found this

http/www.boots.com/en/Boots-Household-ammonia-500ml_923908/

i think you can order it on line as
well and get it dropped at the store
you use and pick it up and pay for it there

Cheers buddy, taking a look now!

are they tropcal or just gold fish

Tropical!!

 

[OldMan47]

Fish are amazingly tough when it comes to being poisoned and surviving it. Your friend that killed off the filter he was watching did not do the fish any favors and unless he actually monitored the tank long enough after to see the effects of the ammonia build up his observation is worthless. A fully mature filter is almost impossible to kill off completely so part of the bacterial colony may have even survived even his rough treatment. To simply keep a filter ticking over, feed the tank with normal fish food as if you had a few fish in it. The fish food will rot and produce enough ammonia to keep your filter going. Be careful not to "overfeed" the empty tank since each bit of food you add will need to be removed manually when you are ready to add in the fish. You don't want a big mess to clean up at that time.

 

[Darr3ll]

Yea i was just relaying a conversation i had..he has no experience with fish, he just happened to tell me that story. And my tank seems to be coming along fine, still monitoring it.

 

[waterdrop]

Agree with KK and OM47.

Not sure what "coming along fine" means here Darr? A working filter is filled with 2 specific species of living bacteria and without being fed, their numbers will diminish rather drastically as the days tick by. As OM47 says, the core of the colonies are pretty tough and will survive longer than one thinks but it is still a good idea to be feeding them properly in some way.

Fish food would likely be the quickest emergency measure (quick in that you'd hopefully have some, but it's actually slower in terms of getting food to the bacteria because it needs to break down into ammonia first itself.)

Boots, Homebase, some forms of Jeys(?) Kleenoff, and some others have been listed by our UK friends (I and some of the others are in the UK and in my case I've never actually -seen- any of these, lol.)

~~waterdrop~~