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.