Question: High ammonia

Hi all, to my frustration i have a very high ammonia reading.
Here's he parameters:

Ammonia 1.0 ppm
Nitrite 0 ppm
Nitrate 0ppm
Please help, i cant bare to do a 75% water change as i have a huge tank :/

Hey hun,
I'd start by doing a 30% water change and re-check what the parameters are- as you're cycling it, i'd be aiming to keep it around .25 for the next few days...

The problem is you need a SMALL amount of ammonia in your water to start it cycling, so what we need to start seeing is a rise in the nitrites and nitrates. But 1.0 is starting to get waay too high. Can you bear to do two or three 20% changes every day?

Also, if you're using prime, don't dose the entire tank, or the cycle will take even longer to establish!
A good thing that may help you is the 20L cans in the camping section of Kmart- they're not overly expensive and for your size tank, it's just a matter of taking two of them out, and putting two back in.

Oh! And unless something really toxic has gone into the tank or someone's badly decomposed, a 75% water change should never be done The most common limit to how much should come out i've seen is a third, so that what bacteria ARE there aren't killed off

Your tank is cycling.

^^^ Agree, sounds like its cycling.

Yes i am aware its cycling as its just been set up, Thanks Caitie, yea I was looking at some other threads and they're suggesting 75% changes and i couldn't do that, 20L would be fine i reckon. I'm not using any sort of chemicals. Here's to axolotls

What are you using to dechlorinate your water? From what I recall, Melbourne tap water's pretty high in chlorine!

I use a combination of a liquid dechlorinator (not sure what its called) and a normal crystal dechlorinator (again not sure of the name). sorry i thought prime was something you add to change the pH/ammonia etc.

Since your tank is cycling I would add a product called Dr. Tim's One and Only Nitrifying Bacteria. This will cycle your tank in about 7 days with no water changes. Since you have to do water changes however I would estimate that it will take longer.

Bdyoung said:

Since your tank is cycling I would add a product called Dr. Tim's One and Only Nitrifying Bacteria.

Click to expand...

I looked into that product when I was cycling my tank and it isn't available in Australia (well not that I've found anyway). Although I haven't tried via international ebay

I am the ebay queen, however im not really up for ading chemicals to the water without knowing more about it. Anyone know exactly how it works?

After a 40% water change, the ammonia is still at 1.0 ppm :/

Olivia97 said:

I am the ebay queen, however im not really up for ading chemicals to the water without knowing more about it. Anyone know exactly how it works?

Click to expand...

I think it's one of those 'bacteria in a bottle' products except this one is refrigerated and therefore the bacteria IS alive and will help cycle the tank. That's only from memory so just google it, you will find a few fish forums that have threads about it :happy:

Oh okay sounds alright then i guess. I have plants in there aswell so it may be delaying the cycling process. I've been closely watching my axy whilst this is going on, and he seems fine so that's my main priority.

Uh, I just want to say that a 75% water change isn't a bad thing. The animals will prefer that toxic water is removed. It also doesn't effect the cycle because the good bacteria is on surface area, not in the water.

Also, the tank is so large that small water changes aren't going to really make an impact on it. Especially if you're doing small water changes throughout the week, in the end, you're really not doing anything to the water and doing a lot more work. If you do half or more, you won't have to do one again for a while and you actually are making an impact.

In any case, I often don't find it all that necessary to worry about cycling when you have axolotls. Ammonia is less toxic at cooler temperatures, so the axolotls aren't going to be heavily damaged by it as a tropical fish would.

Water changes will affect a cycle if your using Dr. Tim's. Also ammonia that high is very toxic and will leave ammonia burns on the axolotl if left to long at that high.

It is so much better and easier to cycle your tank without your axies in it. live plants should keep the ammonia down to unmeasurable and all but prevent the cycling if there healthy plants. the plants arent established yet and the tank is still cycling.

it will be much easier for your axie and speed up the cycling if u can put your axie in a different container. U could use the container water (needs changed daily) and dump it in your tank to give it the waste it needs to start the cycle.

Different container idea sounds promising, and will make it a lot easier on you.
As to the 75%, I would disagree- for one thing, the chances of swinging the water parameters (All of them) is significantly higher, especially in areas where water needs extensive treatment to make it axie- habitable, and those massive swings are incredibly taxing on the animal's physiology. For another thing, a 75% change removes a significant percentage of the bacteria that a cycle seeks to encourage. You can't naturally cycle a tank without ammonia, sadly, and as far as I'm aware, Australia doesn't have easy access to those quick fix solutions which would do it artificially.
Or, to sum up, sure you could do a 75% change, but then the cycle would be destroyed due to the lack of ammonia. I'm with Axiekeeper in moving Mr. B out for a few weeks and dumping the water in his container in to keep the cycle moving. Also, you could get some Sacrificial Guppies to run the cycle with (and if they survive the process, Mr. B can have some great fun chasing them down and nomming on their poor hides when he returns triumphantly to his home

yeah definitely the large water changes will disrupt the cycle process. of course after its mature its not such a big deal.

Just had another readthrough of some of the posts, and wanted to point a few things out

There are bacteria in the water, though you are correct in stating they are predominantly on surfaces, HOWEVER, if you remove their food (That's to say, the ammonia), you're going to kill them. On top of that, if you swing the water parameters around, the bacteria are even slower to adapt than larger organisms, and that can then kill them as well (Which means even fewer bacteria to process waste in your tank.
As to size making smaller water changes irrelevent, twenty percent is twenty percent regardless of if it's a 2L or 2000L tank, and in terms of reducing ammonia, it will have a positive impact, as you are going to have effectively cycled the entire volume of the tank within five changes, but without having massive swings in the water chemistry that the lifeforms within can't cope with.

And cycling being irrelevent? No.
Cycling is the line between your tank being a healthy biosystem and an unhealthy death trap. From my own experiences, not having a tank cycled is the most dangerous thing you can do- in January this year I was (for both health and life intervention reasons) unable to do water changes for around 8 weeks (Yeah, I hear your gasps of horror...), and it was the cycle that kept the water parameters optimal throughout that period. Conversely, our goldfish tank couldn't establish a cycle, and despite doing water changes on a daily basis (Trying so many different methods!), it got to the point where we had to dismantle it due to the effect it was having on its inhabitants- and that's goldfish, who are a lot more hardy than axies.

Okay, now I'm confused. Everyone in my house is annoyed because one minute Im siphoning out poop, the next I'm putting water int the fridge, doing water changes, buying plants, testing water, they're putting up with axolotls in numerous containers in the fridge, and now, I'm taking him out again. And he cost me 20$. *End Rant*

My question remains, what do i do?

1) take him out, when i change his water put it in the tank.
2) Keep in the plants or take them out?
3) Large water changes or not?
4) Add bacteria myself

I can't keep him in a container for more time, he just looks so happy