bacterial bloom..should i do a water change?
- Thread starter sonycrr
- Start date
. water is cloudy and there is ammonia in the water. i have ammo lock in there as well. should i do a water change now or wait?
Honestly i wouldn't use any type of chemicals other than prime and lots of waterchanges. Waterchanges may slow the cycle some, but any chemical that lowers ammonia will def. slow it a lot. the whole point in cycling the tank is letting some ammonia be in the tank to allow bacteria to feed off it and reproduce. Lots of water changes with de-clorinated water will hopefully save your fish and let your tank cycle.
sostoudt;3449893; said:it may slow it down, but if the fish die whats the point of having a cycled tank
^ Great point ^ Any detectable level of ammonia is unhealthy for fish...
Something to keep in mind. As long as there is more ammonia in the water than the current bacterial colony can consume, will trigger an expansion in the bacterial colony
So whether you have .01ppm, or 3 ppm, the bacterial colony will be growing
Therefore I suggest you do what changes to keep the detectable ammonia as low as possible, and I suggest that as long as you have a reading at all, your bacterial colony will be triggered to expand thus doing water changes will not slow down your cycle.
This is another place where more is better does not apply The ammonia reading being higher does not equal faster growth in quantity of bacteria
i was relying on ammonia test strips in the beginning to determine that there was ammonia in the tank .the strips were very hard to see how much ammonia was in there. on saturday, i got the api ammonia tester kit. it showed 8ppm of ammonia. i moved out some of the fish to another cycled tank. i did a 50% water change and the levels dropps by half. the next day they were close to 8ppm again and the water was still cloudy. so i did a huge water change and got the ammonia to about 3ppm. using ammolock becuase they say it will protect fish for up to 3ppm of ammonia. but the thing is that the water is not cloudy anymore. the ammonia now is about 5-6ppm. the tank is a 45g with 4 adult angelfish and 4 serpae tetras. i believe this all started from over feeding. the KH is very low in my tank and i think when there ammonia started to rise in the tank, that caused the PH to drop very low, killing of the BB. so now i add baking soda to the tank to raise the KH so the PH will remain stable even with ammonia in the tank. the ph is now 6.6.. ughhhh....i have no idea what to do now.
since the ph is at 6.6, does that make the ammonia less toxic to the fish?
how long should it take to cycle?
did i kill the BB by doing so many water changes?
should the water still be cloudy beacuse it isnt cloudy anymore?
and can i use the bacteria in the bottle that they sell?
thanks for the help
since the ph is at 6.6, does that make the ammonia less toxic to the fish?
how long should it take to cycle?
did i kill the BB by doing so many water changes?
should the water still be cloudy beacuse it isnt cloudy anymore?
and can i use the bacteria in the bottle that they sell?
thanks for the help