HELP! Ammonia lvls too high!

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H

hereticlosmorte

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Mar 1, 2010
995
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Ontario, Canada
Hey all,

My tank has been doing well for a while now, ammonia was never a problem before. My canister filter has in order from lowest to highest setup: carbon, ammonia remover, nitrite remover, biomedia. During one of my last water changes, I decided to pull out the ammonia remover and add more biomedia. The new setup is, lowest to highest: zeocarb (carbon and ammonia remover combo), nitrite remover, and 2 levels of bio media.

Now the ammonia levels are getting crazy high, and I've had to keep doing water changes everyday to keep it from killing off my stingrays.

Is there anything I can do, other than the water changes? I add in water conditioner every WC and have been adding in nutrafin cycle as well since the spike started.

How long does would it take roughly for the biomedia to reattain control over the ammonia?

Should I just put the ammonia remover back in?

HELP!
 
With few details, really hard to give any meaningful advise.
After reading your post a couple of times, my thoughts are:
1. How long has the tank been running with fish?
2. What are the numbers, ammonia and nitrite?
3. If you have ammonia and nitrite, your tank is not cycled.
4. I have never used ammonia, nitrite removing products, but from your description, sounds like they work.
5. These products are stripping the food your bio media need to grow.
6. Do you have any nitrate?
Sounds like you are near the beginning of a cycle with fish.
Water changes are the only way to keep the fish healthy.
If it were my tank, I would only have media that removes particles and then some bio media in my canister.
Anything extra is not needed.
 
sounds like you are not cycled. If it were me I would just put sponge and ceramic rings in the canister. All that other stuff is a waste and you have to jack around with your filter too often which disrupts you bacteria which sounds like what you have been doing. There is no quick fix to getting the tank cycled, except maybe adding some stability, prime and waterchanges.
 
Agree with Ward1066. More Bio media, check out pond matrix for a cheap solution. Fill the whole canister with bio media and keep up with the water changes.
 
i heard that the zeocarb(carbon n ammonia remover does not work well).. i would just do sponge, ceramic ring , carbon and bio star in the filter setup.. ammonia remover IMO only work when you have it in at all time, i recently took mines out because one of my LFS worker told me it useless. I havent had any problem.. how big is your tank and filter? do you have any substrate?
 
Ammonia removing products aren't only useless in a long-term setup, they starve the beneficial bacteria you are trying to grow. I also agree that all one usually needs (aside from stable pH, etc.) for filtration is mechanical and biological. So what you might want to do is gear one filter toward culturing a large quantity of bacteria (this one you'll rarely clean) and the other filter primarily toward actual mechanical removal of particulates (clean weekly).

For the time being, there's a really good chance that you've got a lot of beneficial bacteria already living in your system. Do a few 50% water changes and feed lightly until it catches up and your ammonia is 0 again.

This is how I've run my main tanks for years now and it's working out wondrously. The only thing I have to do differently than some is to add crushed coral to my filter boxes to buffer the pH, as my tapwater is softer than melted butter.
Hope that helps!
 
thanks for some info guys.

it's a 90g tank, with a fluval 405 on it. the fluval has the big sponges at the beginning, then 4 compartments. first is the zeocarb (which sounds like it's a bad idea.) the second compartment is nitrite remover, third and fourth are biomedia. each compartment is first lined with filter floss, then the media ontop of it (sand substrate makes it VERY messy inside w/o the filter floss).

i have had it completely cycled for a couple months previously, before adding any fish into it. since getting it cycled, i've only added the two retic stingrays and sometimes some ghost shrimp for them to munch on (but a dozen ghost shrimp won't cause that in a 90g). i feed them at least 2 times a day, either frozen brine shrimp, frozen bloodworms, live ghost shrimp, or live blackworms. other than the live food, whatever they don't eat after an hr or two, i scoop out.

my lvls have always been 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite, 0-40 nitrate (do WC's at 40).

the reason i used the ammonia remover, nitrite remover before was because i was told that they were good products. i never thought about the fact that they would be starving my BB. i added them into the filter a bit after my tank was cycled.

i guess for the time being, i will continue to do WC's and i will look into getting some prime (can't seem to find it in southern ontario.)

I should also plan on removing the nitrite remover too, while i'm at it, cuz it's probably starving my BB as well. :-/ gotta keep on top of this so i don't lose my rays
 
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