My roommate severely overfed my fish while I was out of town, and when I got back, I tested the tank, and my nitrite was at 15 ppm! I've been doing 25% partial water changes everyday, and they won't go down! Please help!
Are you getting a false reading? Test water do a 50%. Pwc and then test again. I doubt the cyano is producing nitrate. Maybe lost a few snails hermit fish. ??
You should test your source water and see what the levels are in there. There's no way your levels will go down if you're adding more in with the water.
Nitrates above 40ppm are toxic and nitrites above 0.25 ppm are toxic. You might need to buy some bottled distilled water to get the levels down if your source water has high levels.
My source water is fine.
0 ammonia
0 nitrite
What a conundrum!! Lol, anyways- if your water is that messed up maybe you cleaned a little too well Did you change or wash your filter/ substrate? You could have knocked out some bb in that case. Nite out, quick start, stability(seachem), stress zyme+, if you have a sand substrate make sure your substrate is still sand and not hardened in a carbon bonded state. Purified ocean water 5g boxes are only $11, if all else fails you can spend $22 and cycle out half your tank using that and add trace minerals and nitrifying bacteria and start again. To me it sounds as though your bioload is very high for tank size and your substrate combined with bioload and substrate degradation has made your tank toxic enough to kill off the bb. I hope this helps... Oh and the reason I know this is that I stalled my cycle on my nano reef tank by removing the live rock to fix a phosphate issue in my puffer tank and did some research, so don't feel bad, crap happens
Sounds like you need to circulate your sand/ add new sand. You should do this in small sections of your tank, just break up and remove sand that has hardened like a rock (they contain a calcium carbonate byproduct, not sure what kind off the top of my head, but you definitely sound like you have a stalled cycle and are a little bit on the unstable parameters. Change water every time that you mix up your substrate, honestly I would suggest not doing it everyday, give it about 2 or 3 days. Remember to monitor parameters closely, other than just nites, and top off with processed FRESHWATER to avoid over salinity. Evaporation causes the salt content to raise.
Here's what I did with my stalled tank-
started in front, sectioned off 6 parts, stirred up each section every other day, removed clumps larger than a quarter or black (in black sand it turns white) and added new live sand to keep my substrate at 2-3 inches, did a 10% water change and added purified real ocean water, added my coralline encrusted live rock from my someday to be nano reef tank, and used biozyme marine and stress zyme+ at a half dose and cheated a bit by getting some filter media from my sw lfs and water from their reef tank, but the process is the same- There's a biofloss filter type that contains nitrifying bacteria and cultured bb that is very similar to "cultured" filter media. Just kept an eye on my water parameters and my CUC and puffer, my tank is now fine but it took me a while to get it under control... Free particles, calcium depletion and lack of bb= ammonia byproduct= nitrite= nitrate= phosphate= saltwater crash.... Did any of that help?