haileygrace
Aquarium Advice Newbie
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2022
- Messages
- 1
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)