Water Quality - Ammonia

[Shazzy]

Hello everyone! I have had an aquarium for several years now with fairly great success. The last couple months however, I have been struggling with high Ammonia levels and have even lost some fish. I have tried doing water changes every few days, I have made sure NOT to vac up the sand as I do it. No avial... the ammonia was still staying consistently at 1.0 ppms or slightly higher. I got desperate and tried the Ammonia clear tank buddies... no help. Starting to really doubt things... i decided to test my tap water straight from the tap... i was shocked to see that i have ammonia of slightly more than .5 ppms coming straight out of the tap! I'm guessing I'll never get my ammonia down if the new water is already that high when I make changes... but since I'm only a few years into this... i don't know... maybe that's normal for tap water? I always use tap water conditioner with the new water, so I'm at a loss. I have heard about ammonia chips. Is that a solution? Anything any of you pro's can offer me for advice, I will really appreciate it! Thanks!

 

[HN1]

http://www.aquariumadvice.com/forum...ady-have-fish-what-now-116287.html#post983258

Check this out. You really need to let the tank stabilize. Tinkering with it beyond water changes can only hurt your longterm goals.

 

[Shazzy]

Thank you very much for your reply. I will continue to do nothing but water changes for several more weeks and see if the situation changes. I guess my only other question now is... I cycled this tank a few years ago. I saw the levels spike and then lower. Do you actually have situations where you have to cycle it again?

Again, thank you very much. I love the article you gave me... even though I had cycled some time ago, this article seemed to make it more clear to me as to what I had done! Have a great day!

 

[HN1]

Glad if I can help at all. I'm thrilled you already have cycled and know what I meant.

Absolutely, yes. Tanks get sent into cycles many different ways. If you remove and replace all media, Add fish too quickly or too much at once, Have a fish die and go unnoticed... Anything that either depletes the amount of bacteria present or significantly increases the input ammonia will cause at least a mini-cycle.