Ammonia Appearance

Tank has been cycled for two and a bit months now but after my weekly 30% water change yesterday the ammonia test was not 0. It was not dark enough to say it was 0.25 but was not 0.

It has been zero on every test since it was cycled so not sure where this has come from.

There has been no new fish, no change in feeding (if anything a bit less) and I cannot see any dead fish (all accounted for except for the corys who are hard to count...). I definitely added dechlorinator too.

The only change is that I removed about 1cm of bio filter media (a small %) and replaced the fine floss filter. I would have thought this should not have an impact, eheim 2217 has a 6l canister.

Only other thing is that I dosed Flourish before taking a reading, can that affect it? (But I think I have always done that)

Dosed with Prime anyway but other than monitoring and doing more water changes as necessary is there anything I should be looking for as the cause of this?

 

Got me stumped. But I'm pretty new to water chemistry.

 

My guess is the change in the filter media caused a slight bump. Flourish shouldn't have had an effect. You did the right thing by dosing Prime.

 

I will monitor but does thus mean that the filter is running near capacity? I had been considering a second filter to help with flow

 

No, the filter's gph is fine for your tank size. When removing some of the media, you removed some of the bacteria that was supporting your bioload. Even if you had twice as much filtration, the same thing would have occurred as the bacteria grows only to the amount of ammonia that's available.

 

No, the filter's gph is fine for your tank size.

It was more about flow than gph. The filter is not powerful enough to drive a spray bar across the whole length of the tank so was looking to duplicate so I could have less media in two filters and flow all around the tank





All seems related

 

As far as the gph, I meant it would be enough to filter the water and hold enough media to support the bioload. However, if you are finding that you have dead spots, then yes, a second filter or powerhead would help as previously suggested in your other thread.