I am a newbie, so I need a lot of help. I did have another question. I know a couple people that used to have fish. They say I am doing too many water changes, so if my ammonia goes up, they told me that is ok, they think all the water changes is stressing the fish out. K I got that part, but what i do not get is if there is ammonia I should do a small water change. However i do not want to stress my fish out. They told me that is why bettas died cause of all the water changes I do. Like on my ammonia card is shows alert to ammonia.
Should I do a water change, or wait, until the ammonia goes up?
Sorry but your water change advice was very wrong. Maybe that's why they USED to have fish?
How can having clean water all the time be a bad thing? In my hatchery, the fish were getting water changes daily. It helped them grow better. It's not always
necessary to do daily. ( More on this later)
For good fish husbandry, what you want, as I've said before, is to develop a routine where you routinely change water to freshen the tank environment as well as dilute any organics that may be accumulating. Here's the thing, your fish create ammonia by breathing and by pooping. You can't avoid that unless you keep those plastic fish in the tank.
A fish tank becomes a living breathing ecosystem where things grow to use the things that are present. Consider this: If you just used rain water in your tank, once you cycle a tank, you have created ( or installed) a filter ( biological filter) that will convert the ammonia that your fish produce eventually into a harmless chemical called nitrates. Unfortunately, we don't always have access to rain water so we resort to tap water or store bought water. ( Now for the chemistry lesson
) Unfortunately, our tap water now has all kinds of chemicals in it that are not safe for the fish. It used to be Chlorine which would dissipate if you just left the water sit over night. Now however, it's a chlorine ammonia combination that doesn't dissipate at all. That's fine for humans but is bad for fish. Why is it bad for the fish? Because both ammonia and chlorine, at the levels used, kill fish.
Because ammonia does not dissipate like chlorine, when you break the chlorine ammonia bond, the chlorine dissipates (or gets chemically changed) and the ammonia stays behind. That's bad for the fish if more ammonia is present than the microbes in your biological filter can consume before the ammonia effects the fish. ( Did I lose you yet?
)
Now here's the issue with the biological filter: It's not a constant. It's a variable.
It grows and shrinks based on the ammonia level present in the tank at the time. So if you have a bunch of fish in a tank, you've created an amount of microbes that can consume the ammonia that is presently being produced. If you only have 1 fish in a tank, you only have enough microbes to handle the ammonia produced by that one fish. If you took out some of the fish from the tank with a bunch of fish in it, the amount of microbes would diminish due to lack of food( a.k.a. ammonia). If you added a whole bunch of fish to the tank that just had the 1 fish in it, it would take some time for the amount of microbes to grow to handle the added amount of ammonia now being produced. The problem with that is that the ammonia can be at a level that is toxic enough to kill the fish before that happens.
Like I said, the biological filter is a living breathing thing that constantly is growing or shrinking. So you never want to overload the biological filter by adding too many fish at one time while you can remove fish without seeing any negative effects on the biological filter. Now here's the catch: Say a month down the road you want to add back the same number of fish you took out of that tank with all the fish only to have your ammonia rise to a toxic level and the fish start dying. You think, " I don't understand, the tank held the same amount of fish before
" The problem is that you don't have the same amount of microbes as you had before. THAT is why it didn't work. You will have them again in time but not immediately. So because you are a newbie,
I'll leave this part there.
There is more to keeping a fish tank healthy than just ammonia and nitrates. If I listed all the things, you would probably be looking like
Truth is, it's a chemistry class to keep a tank healthy because there are factors, some out of your control, that change things from harmful to harmless or situations that make things worse or better. You have to know what's what in order to make corrections or adjustments. Yes, you need to be aware of the ammonia level in your aquarium because that is the first thing that can kill your fish but some of our little test kits in the hobby do not take other things into consideration that may change the intensity of the "problem". For example, they do not differentiate between harmful ammonia and harmless ammonium. ( The water's Ph controls which you have.) Some do not differentiate between harmful nitrites from almost harmless nitrates. That's something you need to know. ( I see your eyes glazing over
)
To get back to it's not necessary to change water daily: When you have a healthy biological filter, you feed the fish properly, you don't overcrowd the tank with life, etc., the ecological system is balanced so the need to change water all the time is not there because the water is clean and healthy. But it's not healthy forever as the fish will absorb the minerals and vitamins out of the water, that you don't see, but are replaced when you change water. This is partly why routinely changing water is good thing not a bad thing. As for how much water to change, that's conditional. Under this condition, you need to change this amount and under that condition, you need to change that amount of water. In a tank full of fish, you should change a larger amount of water than you would in a tank with only 1 or 2 fish in a decent amount of water. ( That was for anyone thinking "But what about if the fish is in a 1/2 gallon tank? "
)
So that's it for now. I made it as simple as possible. Get into a routine. Class dismissed.
I've been keeping fish since was 7 years old. That means for coming up on 59 years. I'd been in the tropical fish business for over 45 years where I needed to know about every fish I sold to stores and wholesalers as well as hobbyists. I commercially bred pretty much every fish you commonly find in a fish store. So without patting myself on the back, Yeah, I know a couple things about fish. 
