Originally Posted by jdhef

Cindy, I see in your profile that you are not familiar with the Nitrogen Cycle. The most important thing you can do at this point is read about and understand the nitrogen cycle.

The ammonia in your tank will kill your fish, so I would recommend you start doing daily 50% water changes, using a product called Prime as your water conditioner. The Prime will detox the ammonia (but leave it available to the benificial bacteria) for 24 hours at which point you will be doing another waterchange. You will need to keep this up until you have zero ammonia, zero nitrite and some nitrates.

Also, it can be a little confusing with the ph tests for the API test kit, but you really don't have a high and low ph. (I'm going from memory on the ph range of the two tests since I'm at work and don't have my test kit handy, but you should get what I mean)The low ph tests is for a ph from 6.0 to 7.4 and the high ph test measures ph between 7.2 and 8.4. So for example, if your ph was higher than the range of the low ph test, you would get a reading of the 7.4 (the maximum the low ph test kit tests for) even though your ph could be 7.8. Conversly if your ph were 6.0 the high range ph test would give the bottom reading of 7.2.

I would guess from your results that your ph is actually 8. But don't get too worried about ph. Most fish can easily adapt to a ph betweem 6 & 8 ro so.