Jeffrey Co

So no need to do water change at 20PPM? I thought Nitrates are bad for fish. I do have plants but they are still growing. Slowly converting from artificial plants to natural plants. Fertilizers are safe for the fish I hope. I use Flourish as fertilizers. I stopped it for the time being since the Nitrite spike.

I feel so dumb not reading the instructions fully. But you helped a lot with this. My nitrate reading is now 20ppm while Nitrite is 0. 20ppm super high??? When I see that, it makes me want to do an immediate water change. My PH has gone up to 7.8. Not sure what's going on there (I've been putting seachem stability (half the dosage as instructed daily) and also added Tim's One and only Nitrifying bacteria. Today my ammonia went up by a little (.25 from 0). I hope that's manageable. Am doing daily tests and recording it. I have a feeling that things are stabilizing. I lost one fish yesterday and that likely is the last one from the spike in Nitrite last week. Am also lessening the feeding. BTW, I use the API Master Test Kit. Fairly new. Once again, a huge thank you and to everyone in this forum.

First of all, thank you for your thoughtful response. I am truly amazed on so many people giving a lengthy and detailed response. That takes so much of people's time and I appreciate it very much. I did a test of the PH of my water right from the tap water. It reads between 6.8 to 6.9. I use API Master test kit. At the aquarium, the PH is pretty much the same. Today my nitrite level has gone back to zero. My nitrate is zero (well the color should be yellow when zero for the test but the color for me coming out of my API test is clear, not even yellow). I personally think that's better but not 100 percent sure. It just seemed to me that the medications messed up my filtration. My emergency measures so water changes and seachem stability hopefully got it back squared away. However, I am monitoring daily in case anything spikes up.

Thank you for this tip. I have ordered Dr Tim's One and Only and have been putting Seachem Stability along with the 50 percent change in water daily to get the Nitrite down. I really hope things would normalize soon. It's so sad seeing fish die so quickly.

I ran it at 85 to speed up the ICH process. Once the Ich is completely gone, I bring the temperature back to 78 degrees. But the nitrites prior to me adding the medication were all zero. It's been zero (good numbers) for years. It was after using the medications that I suddenly saw the Nitries spike up. Is that possible? I am thinking the medication killed the beneficial bacteria.

I thought of writing here to get ideas from like minded people. I have an established 55 gallon aquarium (been there for years) and just got started two months ago of cleaning up the aquarium and putting it fish (guppies, swordtails and platys). My filter is a combined SunSun canister and a sponge filter. The sponge filter is new as the old sponge filter i used it for my quarantine tank to cycle it. The water parameters on my main tank before problems occured are below. Water Parameters: pH 6.5 Nitrates - 0 ppm Hardness - hard (North California) Nitrite 0 ppm Ammonia 0 ppm KH/Buffer - ?? Water Temperature - 85 degrees I created a separate quarantine tank (10 gallon aquarium) where I put fish that seemed sick (ick). I used the method suggested by Cory. Put ick-x, maracyn, paracleanse all together on first day when introducing new fish. Leave it for five days before putting fish in my main tank. One day, on my main tank, I saw ich. Because I saw it on several fish, I panicked that all the fish in the 55 gallon aquarium is going to get ich. I put the required dose of ich-x (5-6 capfuls) every day and changed the water about 20 percent. I stopped the canister filter as it may have activated carbon inside. As a day go by, I worried thinking that turning off the filter may be hurting the quality of the water. So in a 24 hour period, I would only run the filter for the second half of the 24 hour period. That way, the water gets cleaned. After a few days, I saw my fish dying and the ones that seemed healthy, no signs of ich are dead the following day. Some of these are red ear albino guppies, and regular adult guppies, some are big platys, some are the baby frys. I tested the water and the nitrite level was extremely high. I was puzzled what happened. In an emergency mode, I did a 50 percent water change and then applied SeaChem Prime and Stability. The first (Seachem Prime) to neutralize the effect of the Nitrite and Seachem Stability to introduce beneficial bacteria again. I am thinking that my beneficial bacteria were killed my Ich-X. Could this be true? I have been more aggressive on my quarantine tank (putting in Maracyn, Maracyn Oxy, Paracleansem, Ich-X) in hopes that it will kill whatever bad stuff that's in there. But their nitrite level is also way up. More than 5ppm. Something has gone wrong and I'm left guessing and hoping someone reads this and sees what I did wrong. Other possibilities are that I fed them a lot, but the sudden spike on Nitrite on all 3 aquariums (main tank plus two new quarantine tanks ) is a head scratcher. Could Maracyn oxy been the beneficial bacteria killer? I bought it by mistake thinking it was the same as Maracyn, so I thought why not use it as well. Water Parameters after fish started dying: pH 6.5 Nitrates - 0 ppm Hardness - hard (North California) Nitrite 5 ppm Ammonia 0 ppm KH/Buffer - ?? Water Temperature - 85 degrees Thank you in advance.