jeffro

My wife wanted to get me a tank for my birthday 2 months ago so after talking to the guy at the pet shop, we decided on a 55 gal tank. After a week, the ammonia was at .25mg/L, nitrites 0 and nitrates 20mg/L, so local pet shop guy said to go ahead and add a few fish (2 molly's and a platy). Things were going good (according to pet shop guy) and we kept adding more fish until we got to 11 (2 guppies, 4 platys, 2 mollys, 1 pictus catfish, 2 dwarf gouramis).

Everyone seemed happy until we went away for a few days for Thanksgiving and one of the fish died and by the looks of him when we got back, he was dead for at least a couple days. This sent the ammonia and nitrites through the roof (ammonia 2 mg/L and nitrites 3mg/L). I did a 50% water change and added Prime. It brought the ammonia to 0.5 and the nitrites to 1. A few days later the nitrites were back up to 3. Then one fish got dropsy so we quarantined it and treated both tanks with Myracyn (sp?) 2. Since then I have been doing water changes and adding Prime. I just did a 25% water change 2 nights ago and the nitrites are back up in the 3-5 range. Is there anything else that I should be doing to cycle the tank? It's a real pain for me to do water changes since we have a water softener and I read posts on this forum recommending against using softened water. So I take 55 degree water from before the softener and heat it to temperature before adding it to the tank. It's not too much fun doing this every couple days.

After we treated with the Myracyn 2, we put new filters in. Could part of the dead fish still be in the foam part of the filter that doesn't get changed?

I'm currently down to 4 fish and really want to keep them alive.

Thanks,
Jeff

Dino

You can rinse the foam part with used aqaurium water.

Welcome to the forum.

jsalemi

See if a LFS near you has a product called Stability by Seachem. There's been mixed results reported with it, but I had good success with it and my 56g in getting the cycle going full blast. And unlike Bio-Spira, it can be used with fish in the tank (Bio-Spira is really recommended for fishless cycling, AFAIK).

jeffro

Thanks for the replies.

Does anyone know if Prime reduces the nitrites or does it just bind them in a form that's not harmful to the fish.

jsalemi

I believe Prime and AmQual Plus just bind the ammonia and nitrites into a harmless form. The only real way to reduce them is through the bacteria eating them.

jeffro

When I was doing the water change last night, I noticed there is brown slime on the 2 water outlets of the filter and also in the intake pipe. Is this the beneficial bacteria (if you can even see it) or should I clean this off?

jsalemi

No, the bacteria are way too small to see. That's probably just gunk from the water or brown algae, so you can wipe it off.