Re-Cycle Fully Stocked Tank

[haileygrace]

Hello! We’re relatively new to the hobby and may have made a mistake. We have a fully stocked tank that was cycled but recently decided to upgrade our layout as well as our filter. We kept the original filter running for a month before removing it, thinking our new one was established with beneficial bacteria. Whelp…looks like it’s not. We have been doing daily water changes for about a month now and ammonia is still present with very minimal conversions to nitrite or nitrate. We have no ammonia present in the tap water. We have a 55 gallon with the Fluval FX4 canister and the draw to that canister filter is that we can perform water changes from the filter itself. I’m wondering if by removing water through the filter, are we removing any beneficial bacteria that started growing as well? We took advise from someone to stop doing water changes and as soon as we did that, ammonia spiked (duh). We were hoping that with more ammonia, it might trigger the good bacteria to start working it’s magic. We treat with Prime and Stability daily so we haven’t had fish deaths from the ammonia…but when the ammonia spiked so high, there was less dissolved oxygen and we lost a few fish. We added more air stones and the rest of the fish have been fine but I’m not sure what else to do at this point. I think we have enough filtration based on the tank size but do you think adding another canister will help? Should we not do changes from the canister and siphon the water manually? We’ve doing about 30-50% daily water changes for a month (if not longer) and our ammonia is still too high (ranging between 0.25-2 ppm!!!). We have the following fish and are fully stocked (if not overstocked once the fish hit their full size potential, will probably upgrade the tank size down the road):

• 2 blue gouramis
• 1 gold gourami
• 1 snakeskin gourami
• 1 robertsoni
• 1 blood red jewel cichlid (very small currently)
• 1 electric blue acara (very small currently)
• 1 albino bristlenose pleco (very small currently)
• 7 cory catfish (very small currently)
• 9 kuhli loaches (very small currently)

We recently added the pleco at the advice of our LFS because we had green algae start to grow on our newly added rock and spiderwood - those are the only “real” components of the tank as we have fake plants everywhere else. I would love any advice or feedback that anyone can provide, we just want our little fish to be happy without us needing to do large water changes every single day

 

[Aiken Drum]

Your filter is massively oversized for your tank size, so you certainly dont need another canister. Your filter size isnt the issue. Do you have enough filter media in there though? I like to have about 1kg of filter material per 100 litres of water (ill let you do conversions if you arent metric).

With hindsight, you should have moved the filter media from your old established filter into your new one when you removed the old one. That would have retained your cycle.

Honestly, i think you may be changing water too often. You need some ammonia in there. Ammonia being present isnt an issue, and depending on your waters pH, it can get quite high before it becomes toxic to fish?

What is your pH?

I would change water based on water test results. Target should be to keep ammonia + nitrite combined no higher than 0.5ppm. If you are only seeing 0.25 or even 0.5ppm ammonia (with no nitrite) then leave it and retest the next day.

Ive never heard that using the filter to remove water causing issues with getting the cycle established, but all the gunk that builds up in the filter is where the beneficial bacteria live, so if the water changes is removing the gunk build up i would stop doing this until your cycle establishes.

Stability. Of all the beneficial bacteria products, thats the one i see poorest reports on. Try changing to tetra safestart or dr tims one + only. Ive had best results with one + only. Be aware that all of these products are hit and miss, mostly miss. The best thing you can do is get some filter media from an established filter and put it in your filter or squeeze out a sponge from an established filter into your water. Perhaps you have a friend who keeps fish who could let you have some?

Cycling a new tank/filter can take months. The month you have been doing daily water changes isnt all that unusual.