Water testing

Been reading a lot on here about water testing, so far haven't done any on tank Ugly is living in - so it is something that is necessary, if so can someone please let me know what I am meant to be testing for and how I do the testing?

Pets @ home said just treat her like you would a goldfish tank which is what I have been doing and so far she seems ok if a little shy still

Hi Tracey,

This is the article you should also read http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/cyclingEDK.shtml

You need to monitor the pH, ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels in the tank. When the tank is first set-up daily tests are usually necessary but when cycling is complete, the frequency of testing can be greatly reduced.

Please review the article and let us know if anything is unclear.

Ed

Tracey you should be testing the water for ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. If your tank is new and un-cycled, you should be testing daily. If your tank was cycled, weekly.
You can buy strip tests or chemical test kits.
I'm fairly new to keeping axie too, but I think that I'm correct in saying that the readings should be:

ammonia - 0
nitrite - 0
nitrate - about 40

I hope that this helps you out a little.

I do not recommend the test strips as they are in general very inaccurate.

Ideally the levels should be
ammonia 0
nitrite 0
nitrate less than 80 but 40-60 maybe ideal. (high levels of nitrate >100 has been known to cause immunosuppression in some fish).

it was an established tank that had previously had a very large goldfish in, i changed one of the filter pads and half the tank water - she has been in there 2 weeks as from tomorrow now, but i will see about getting a testing kit this week and see what is what.

ps.. do i just ask the shop of a tank testing kit?

Tracey, just ask for a water testing kit that will test nitrate, nitrite, and ammonia.
I've recently bought one by Nutrafin, its an 'Essential Mini Master test kit' which tests nitrite, natrate, ammonia and ph. Its a chemical test kit and was reduced from £25 to £19.99.

Hi Wendy,

Depending on the size of the tank and the water quality before you changed it over to an axololt setup it could have crashed and may now be recycling. Longterm tanks if the bioload is too large, they are overfed and/or there are insufficient water changes can have the pH drop as low as 5 (or lower). This causes the process of conversion of ammonia to nitrate to stop but there are often no overt signs on the fish as most of the ammonia has been converted to ammonium by the low pH. Ammonium is relatively non-toxic. The problem then occurs when water changes etc are performed on the aquaria changing the paramaters restarting the cycling process.

Another possibility is how long the tank sat before changed it over to a axolotl tank. If it was unoccupied for more than a couple of weeks the bacterial numbers begin to decline due to a lack of food.

Ed

Hi Ed - Sorry i'm totally lost by all this.

Tank and be set up and running as an established fish tank for well over 6 years, was stand along for about 36 hours before it became a Axololt one - then i just changed one of the form filters and left the other in, and about half ish of the tank water if that.

Won't be able to get a testing kick until probably Thursday night, but once i have one what sort of levels of different stuff should i be looking for?

TT

Hi Tracey,

I made the comments about the long-term set up of the tank as over time, the pH in set up tanks goes down as the conversion of ammonia to nitrate by bacteria releases acid (as noted in the link provided above). As the pH of the system goes down there is a decrease in the conversion of ammonia to nitrite to nitrate as low pH inhibits the bacteria. The low pH converts the ammonia to ammonium which is relatively non-toxic.
If this has occured, doing a large water change on the system will raise the pH causing the tank to recycle. The length of time for this to occur depends on how low the pH had dropped and how much of the bacteria that convert ammonia to nitrite to nitrate are left in the tank. It really all depends on how many/big the fish were in the tank, how much they were fed (and if they were over fed) and how often routine water changes were performed on the tank (and how much was changed each time).

The paramaters you want to test for are pH, ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. The paramaters you want are a pH between 6.8 and 7.8, ammonia zero, nitrite zero and a nitrate level below 80 ppm (with the lower the better).

Ed

still lost - will get a kit and do the tests then take it from there...

tanks had one very large fish in, was feed every night, water was never changed just topped up when water level dropped, (had good filter system so didn't need water changes)

TT

If the water was never changed and just topped up, then there wasn't anything removing nitrate from the tank. This would result in the tank being very acidic as well as possibly very high in disssolved salts. (remember all of the ions and dissolved in the water stay behind as the water evaporates (think salt lake)). The nitrate level is also probably very high which can cause immunosuppression in the axolotl. Having a good filter doesn't mean you don't have to do water changes, it just means that the water looks cleaner...


Ed