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Just did a 20% water change so when should I retest for ammonia? Should I wait 24 hours after the water change? Ammonia was creeping up from 0 to .125 and .25 last night.

New Aquarium and loving it!

If it's creeping up I'd test daily and do more water changes. Is the tank cycling? Have you gravel vac'd? If not do so(unless the tank is still completing it's initial cycle). Are there any missing fish, dying plants? Something is causing the NH4 to creep up and you need to find it. If you have cycle, or biospira add it. If you use prime for a water conditioner add a double dose.

"If you're afraid you'll make a mistake, you won't make anything."
-Family Circus

The tank has cycled but I did add 3 fish last friday and then 5 cory's the next friday (this past one) May be that. Will test tonight and do a water change again if necessary. No dead fish and no live plants in there. Thanks for the advice.

New Aquarium and loving it!

Hi there leana,

Yeah, the added fish may have caused the cycle to kick in again. How big is the tank anyway? I tried to look at your other threads but you must have disabled this feature in your profile, so I don't know if you stated more about this tank somewhere else.

How did you cycle the tank, for how long, when did you add what fish, tank size, and anything else you could think of would be helpful. When you removed the water, did you vacuum, if so how much of the substrate (hopefully not the whole area)? Did you change/clean your filter (might also be bad, at this time)?

Ingo

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Proud Member of the New Jersey Aquatic Gardeners Club

Whew! That's a lot of questions! I will try to summarize the whole process. Set up tank on Jan 4th. Added 2 lemon tetras and 2 flame guoramis next day as was told it would be ok by LFS but I now know better since on this forum. Jan 11th added 6 neons. This was in my 10 gallon tank. On Feb 10th I transfered these fish into a new 25 G tank using the filter from the 10 gallon. Ammonia was 0 nitrites 0 nitrates 20 ph 7. Added 3 platys Feb 11th. Have been testing all along and stats were the same. Added 5 corys on Feb 17th and ammonia was up on the 18th (.125) and on the 19th (.25) Did 20% change on 20th and all are back to 0 since then. I am testing daily. Will let tank settle before adding more fish. In this whole process I only lost one guorami. Had some fin rot on it and the lemons but I treated them 1st week of Feb and all's ok. That's my big long story./:'

New Aquarium and loving it!

Oh ya, and I will add 4 more lemon tetras as long as everything stays stable and that would be my limit. So should I check for ammonia every day from now on or every week or two??????

New Aquarium and loving it!

I would check at least once a week and for a couple of days after adding adding fish, when the fish have all been in for a few weeks and everything is running smoothly then you may only need to test for ammonia if something starts to go wrong. It's a good thing to test to rule out as a cause, then you know what's not wrong with the tank.

"If you're afraid you'll make a mistake, you won't make anything."
-Family Circus

leana,

Yeah, that sounds like you got an expert salesman there at your LFS

Glad you lost only one fish in the process .

Just like luvmykrib said, when you add new fish you may want to test the water qualit daily for about a week, and then maybe once a week for the next month, and after that you can switch to "occasional" testing, given that you don't mess with the tank in other ways, like re-arranging the substrate and so forth.

Have fun,

Ingo

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Proud Member of the New Jersey Aquatic Gardeners Club