This is bad, right?...the tale of my first freshwater tank.

[schoeplein]

This is what my cycling tank stats looked like. Everything is back to 0-.25ppm now. I've cycled several salt water tanks, but never saw them spike this bad. Totally different water chemistry. Also a much smaller tank than I'm used to dealing with (5g vs 50+g).

Also, never trust your fish store "professional" - the piece of weighted driftwood I was sold was not "pre-treated/soaked". Took about 25 gallons of water changes over a week or so to remove most of the tannin, yellow tint from the water.

I'd also like to plug Purigen here. Holy moly. After the water cleared up from the driftwood, there was still a cloudiness to the water. Now it looks as clear as my 55g saltwater tank with a 25g sump and 1500g UV sterilizer. All the reviews comment on its amazingness, but not it's smell. The stuff straight up smells like fish. Fortunately it's in a canister filter and doesn't permeate into the water, nor the air.

Check her out. The guppy is going back to the store. Dwarf gourami wants the tank to himself.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Aquarium Advice mobile app

 

[NanoJack]

Looks deadly. How old is the tank?

 

[schoeplein]

That was after about 10-12 days. It's several weeks now. Got the tank at the beginning of March.

 

[NanoJack]

My tank is 4.6 gallons. Net gallons minus rocks and substrate prolly 3.6.
It took about 5 weeks for my tank to cycle. It's different for everyone. Looks like your tank is not cycled. I would wait till you have 0 ammonia and 0 nitrite before adding fauna.

 

[schoeplein]

Muuuuuuuuuuch better.