I just cleaned out the fx6, found alot of mulm on the sponges. i cleaned out all the sponges. left out the ceramic media. and now all sponges are clean. maybe too much ditritus on sponges.
Should I be worried? Prazipro
- Thread starter Jesseliu13
- Start date
I can only hope that after the cleaning and the prazipro that it will help them. I gave them a frieght as they seem to have been skittish after i removed the fx6. after the removal and i put them back they seemed to be all extremely active. their breathing definitely slowed down compared to before. im not sure what phenomenon is happening lol. I wont be cleaning anything else than possibly removing the filter floss. i plan on redoing my filtration and adding a k1 kaldness 55 gallon drum the the mix. so that when they graduate from the 300 i can just completely move the 55 gallon drump filtration.
can you post some pictures of the rays divot? Also is the ammonia back to zero? what is the pH in the tank? any recent additions to the tank? Anyone showing aggression?
I'll post tomorow morning. I will do another testing tomorow. I think my ph test kit is bad so I need to get another one
Ok something very wrong with the tank. I just went to go check my Frontosa tank's ph just to see if the test kit was a dead one. It works. And I just tested my Ray tank twice. I'm still reading 6. Meaning it's still very acidic. And in fact I just looked at my ammonia this morning and it's at a .5 now. I am going to start siphoning out my sump of all the ditritus and start looking through my sump and other filtrations to see if there something causing the ammonia and acidity. I will also do another large water change. Something in my tank is definitely dead and it's hiding from me...
Low ph reduce the production and efficiency of nitrosonoma bacteria. Which may be the reason why I am getting such high ammonia. I don't think water changes would do that. Not even my dechlorinated water has .5 ammonia. I tested straight out of tap and with sodium thiosulfate. If they aren't converting ammonia then the ammonia will continue to rise. I am doing a 50% water change. Cleaned out the ditritus in sump and cleaned out the mechanical filtration again. Also changed the floss pads in the ehiem 2217. Didn't rinse anything. Tested ph out of tap. It's at. 7.4 meaning something in my tank is causing my tank to become acidic. I am also going to dig up sand a little section by section throughout the week.
Your ph can settle below what it comes out of tap. When you get ph as low as 6 ammonia becomes ammonium which isn't particularly toxic. I believe ammonia tests will read ammonia+ammonium. The problem is when you change out 80% of your ph 6 water, you add 80% 7.4 water. Because you don't have vast amounts of ammonia present the beneficial bacteria colony is quite small, but the ammonium in the water breaks down into more ammonia than your bb can handle at that ph. Combine it with the fact that ammonia becomes more toxic at high ph and you are basically nuking your rays until the ph settles back down. You need to slowly build a bb colony, which means slowly raising your ph with buffers like crushed coral. If you raise it too much too quickly that ammonia will become toxic more quickly than the bb will deal with it. You can do small water changes to gradually raise ph, but big ones are bad news. I am a water chemistry noob so it's not well explained or maybe even correct.
