What's Going On With My Water?

[Lisa67]

My tank has been cycled and fully stocked for about 6 weeks. Every time I've tested the water my amonia has been 0, nitrite 0 and nitrate usually 0, but occasionally a low reading. I've been doing approx 20% water changes every 5 days or so. All of my fish are alive and well, (so far).

Yesterday I did a routine water change (I did not test the water first). Today, just for the heck of it I decided to test the water. My amonia was 0.5, nitrite 0 and nitrate 40 . So, today I did a 40% water change (plus the 25% yesterday). Nitrate only dropped to between 20-40.

I decided to test my tap water. For some reason the amonia was .25, nitrite 0 and nitrate 0. I have well water and it has been raining like CRAZY here... not sure if that could cause amonia in my water. I'm puzzled about why I still have so much nitrate in my tank. Can't see doing another water change today when I have amonia in my tap water. Why would I suddenly have these spikes? The only thing I did different was clean the water intake on the filter.

 

[waterdrop]

Sometimes various cleaning activities can just cause little spikes. Don't worry about it too much. Give it some time. It does not surprise me at all that a change like lots of rain might cause some ammonia to turn up in your well water. Some of the rain water may have worked its way down to the water table and carried some chemicals along with it from the ground. Since you are seeing 0.25ppm from the well, you could still perform small (10%, half of what you've been doing) changes more frequently and I would also continue to test the well water. It's likely it will drop back down to zero ammonia and at that point you'll be able to go to your usual percentages.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Lisa67]

Thank you. That makes me feel a little better. Any idea why I would still have so much nitrate after 2 water changes?

 

[waterdrop]

It's always hard to tell why one sees nitrate(NO3) fluctuations between test periods, but its quite common to see them and they can be pretty signicant in numbers. Nitrate in the amounts you're measuring however is not really an issue and I wouldn't worry about it. Some of the reasons may be that nitrate testing is very "flakey" and even good analytical chemists have trouble with it. The tests just vary a fair about from time to time. You have to shake up the second reagent bottle, even sometimes whacking it against something to get the precipitates to mix. Another reason may be that nitrate(NO3) can "hang out" in the gravel or in the filter box and then kind of get unleashed when it is disturbed, typically when cleaning events occur.

~~waterdrop~~