Pizzafan

Thanks all for the comments and suggestions! It is a pretty heavily planted tanks and no die offs so far or noticeable issues with the fish… but it’s only been a couple days. I have sand, and have vacuumed up some crap this weekend, so maybe that had some effect? I also never thought about testing ammonia in my tap water 🙂 Got a bottle of Tetra safestart today to throw in, so hoping that helps. I was just curious what could be the cause of the issue so it doesn’t become a recurring problem.

Hi all, I’ve had my tank for a few months now, generally with no ammonia or nitrites anymore. just recently have had a large spike in my nitrites since the past couple days (~3-5 ppm with api kit), but zero ammonia. Is this pretty common to happen that the nitrite metabolizing bacteria can crash even though the ammonia metabolizing bacteria are fine? Any tips?

Hi all, this is such a useful resource to learn and get ideas as I’m new to the hobby (at least since I was a kid 20 years ago and continually killed fish with ich and overstocking). I have a 20 Long tank I bought “for my kid”… so far has a black lyretail molly, a couple zebra danios (that I used to cycle my tank), 4 Kuhli loaches, and a Nerite snail. A bunch of Java ferns and other small plants (dwarf sag, bacopa in back), including a water lilly bulb that recently started exploding. I plan to get a school of tetras in the near future.