Amonia! Help!

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Pazzoman

Piranha
MFK Member
Apr 5, 2009
3,005
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New York
Help!

Well I have a 72 gallon bow front tank 48in. by 16in by 25in. Well here is what happened:

My aunt and I cleaned the filter our fluval 405. I t was disgusting, I mean it was filthy as hell...The sponges were completely white when purchased, but then became completely black with lots and lots of sluge. Well we changed everything brand new for the filter.

It has 4 compartments which contains:

1:Pre filter(Weird cement rings"
2:Ammo Chips
3:Fluval Clearmax 2 packs
4:Fluval Carbon 2 packs

On the sides have 4 longs brand new sponges.

The tank currently houses a clown knife fish, 4 silver dollars and a florida gar.

Silver Dollars 3-4inches
Clown Knife 9-10 inches
Gar -6 inches

I don't know if we set the filter wrong, which is why thier is an amonia problem....We cleaned the filter sunday and today I did a water change and still has amonia please help!!!!!!
 
By changing out the Mech filtration then what you did was took out the Beneficial Bacteria or bb. So now your tank gets to Cycle again. The best way to clean your filters is to take a few gallons of water out of your tank, put into bucket, rinse the mech filter (sponge) in the tank water. You don't want to get it completely white again, just get the large clogging crap out of it. With the canisters having multiple sponges, you just use mulitple buckets of water to rinse with. I clean my AC 110 around once every 3-5 weeks, more often for more fish. Good Luck!!
 
BTW, is this the first cleaning? how long has it been running between cleanings if not?
 
Well the problem is that everything in that filter was discarded, I've been using some bacteria medicine. Also i didn't clean the substrate so thier should be bacteria in it....is thier anything else I can do?
 
Not that I know of. Hopefully somebody else will chime in and give you a hand with this. Maybe doing lots of little water changes, 5 gallons each day may help, I'm not really sure though. Good Luck. Would hate to see anyone pass on over this. makes for one expensive lesson.
 
check at your pet store for either stability by sea chem or cycle by hagen they are benificial bacteria to ease the stress level on the fish and ease them through the cycle
 
bio-spira and tims one and only seem to be good bb in a bottle products
im guessing most of the bacteria was in your filter and very little was in the gravel, so the small amount of bb left can't keep up with the bioload
just feed your fish less, skipping feedings completely for a day or two
 
Like others have said your tank is cycling again. The big majority of your BB is in the filter replacing everything took that BB out and the little bit that you have else were like substrate etc can't keep up. Your either going to need to get some mature filter media or do water changes several times a day until its cycled. Anytime your ammonia or nitrites get over 0.25ppm you will have to do a water change. 99 percent of the bacteria in the bottle products do not work by the time you get them all the bacteria is dead. Saw someone mention bio-spira if you find some of this don't use it because it will have expired they stopped making it for freshwater sometime ago.
 
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