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Ok so I'm cycling again... I thought I wouldn't have to, but I am... silly me.

The problem is, I've been cycling for a couple weeks and I'm currently going trough my second bacterial bloom. I'm pretty sure it's the nitrite guys because my nitrite tested 0 today and it had been a lot higher a few days before.

My problem is, during the cycle, to help reduce I added ammolock, NIC and bio-safe to the aquarium. Now when I test for ammonia I get a reading off the chart, 20+ppm which obviously is impossible as the fish would be dead, or at least heavily stressed which they're not *points to perky finned hungry fish*.

So I'm just wondering if anyone has known any of these chemicals to lead to bad readings?

The ammolok. I believe it actually tells you it gives false readings on the bottle.

This chemical will convert some of the ammonia to LESS toxic ammonium, thus giving false readings, becase the nessler agents will still react. You'll get false readings until all the ammo-lok is gone from your system.

Sorry man

I could have sworn the bottle said it wouldn't cause false readings... Well anyway... Glad to know I don't have a toxic waste dump...

If you used a non-nessler based reagent, it probably wouldn't.

"Ammo-Lock" is a fine product to throw in the trash...

In an emergency, when a tank becomes totally unstable because of a bacteria killoff, Ammo-Lock can be dosed.

Otherwise, the product binds the toxic ammonia molecule to the non-toxic molecule producing a large combination of harmless ammonia that liquid testers read as toxic, or at least read that ammonia is present in large concentrations.

Never dose Ammo-Lock with NIC. The bacteria in NIC can and will feed on the harmless bonded ammonia but to what extent I cannot say.

--garyroland.