Ammonia spike help

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Mrjoshua313

Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Joined
Aug 24, 2012
Messages
21
Hi I'm new to this forum. I have a 30g aquarium, with 5-guppies a couple fry(fry box)2 long skirt tetra, 2-adf, 8- neons and breeding Kribs(just added last week). It was fully cycled around 8/17/12. So I added 2 more fish, then had a little ammonia spike(.25) then did a partial water change. Now my ammonia spiked to (2). Just did another w.c.
As of now here are the water parameters:
Ammonia-2
Nitrite-0
Nitrate-5
Ph-6.5
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
 
Mrjoshua313 said:
Hi I'm new to this forum. I have a 30g aquarium, with 5-guppies a couple fry(fry box)2 long skirt tetra, 2-adf, 8- neons and breeding Kribs(just added last week). It was fully cycled around 8/17/12. So I added 2 more fish, then had a little ammonia spike(.25) then did a partial water change. Now my ammonia spiked to (2). Just did another w.c.
As of now here are the water parameters:
Ammonia-2
Nitrite-0
Nitrate-5
Ph-6.5
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Did you gravel vac? Maybe stirred some debris up, I don't see adding 2 fish causing a spike although it's small. Are you using a water conditioner like Prime etc?

Just keep doing your pwc's and bring the number down.
 
Yes I did,had to take out drift wood because saw a light white groth on it. So took it out and gave it a good scrubing. Then put it back in. So I did stir up some stuff. Will keep up with the wc. I'm using stress coat+ and stress zyme+.
Thanks
 
Mrjoshua313 said:
Yes I did,had to take out drift wood because saw a light white groth on it. So took it out and gave it a good scrubing. Then put it back in. So I did stir up some stuff. Will keep up with the wc. I'm using stress coat+ and stress zyme+.
Thanks

Your welcome. Just throwing this out there. You don't need stress zyme or stress coat. Prime will do the trick or Amquel Plus.

But Prime is very very popular around here. It's very good and it would cut the other stuff out. In this hobby less is more. Try to add as little chemicals as possible. I only use Prime and nothing else. Just do weekly water changes and sometimes one in between.
 
Wanted to add my two cents as well..I recently switched to Prime after using both the stress coat and Zyme. My ammonia spike went up with each water change after using both products and I ruled out most of the causes so I was stumped. ( I had been using them for a couple months and never had a total zero reading each week) Even though they do their job breaking things down, they don't contain the additive to convert the ammonia released into ammonium (like Prime does) so the ammonia will go up and up. Municipal tap water is full of chloramines which are being broken down and registering your API test off the charts.

My thought: after a good gravel clean like others said, maybe do a good %40 water change and start using Prime. My 30 and 50 gal was back to just about perfect in a couple days. It's ok to do little partial changes until you get the levels down. The bacteria needed is in media/under gravel, so should be fine. Hope things improve if you try that :)
 
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