nitrite issues

hello,
So....I am at a loss, I'm throwing myself on the mercy of MFK and the experts within....I have a 55L tank that contains one 6" yellow bullhead catfish, 4 small local crayfish and several floating pond plants. I was nearing the end of the tank cycle so me being cocky decided to add all of the mentioned bioload at one time...needless to say the tank crashed. With the help of Tetra SafeStart and Stability, I managed to get my ammonia levels back to 0.0 ppm.

My problem now....is my nitrites are hovering somewhere between 2.0 ppm and 3.0 ppm. they WILL NOT come down no matter what I try.

Water changes, more Stability, plants, nothing is bringing them down.

I need any advice you guys can offer as to what I can do to stabilize this tank completely again.

It's only the nitrites that are out of control, everything else is within manageable levels.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Thats what I figured the best solution was...I just didn't know if there was something else out there I hadn't heard of yet to knock the nitrites down. I mean safe start and stability work flawlessly to knock the ammonia out of the tank (3 days it went from 5 ppm to 0.0) but nitrites are a different story.
THanks for the advice!

i figured I would let the tank do its thing, I just wasn't sure how to handle no ammonia but a whoooole bunch of nitrite, thanks everyone!

brich999 said:

+1 isnt stability known to give false readings? You dont "knock out" ammonia in a matter of days. And nitrite being out of whack is just because you dont have the bb to sustain the whole cycle or your nitrates would be high.

Ok ill say it. 6" messy catfish and 14.5g of water is going to lead to bad water quality unless you are feeding very lightly (borderline starving the fish) or doing wc constantly

Click to expand...

Stability definitely is not giving a false reading on this, the ammonia is gone lol, this is...a week after starting treatment and its gone. 3 different test kits and even crappy strip tests that always give super high readings say there is nothing in the tank.

I do 50-75% water changes twice a week, if not 3 times so believe me besides the nitrites going out of control for a couple days the water quality is good.
UPDATE: Nitrites are dropping now, steadily. down to around 1.0 ppm. I added some live plants as well so that may be having an effect.

Thanks all for the input!