cycling tank week 4 questions

test results are .5 ammonia 0 nitrites and 0 nitrates maybe a few ph 8.4. I did 4 gal water change at week 1 2 and 3 and haven't cleaned the filter or the gravel. Ive been testing every day or every other day. 3 zibras 3 black fin tetras seems to be going rly slow. Got some seeded gravel from the critter store as they said it should be spiking in nitrites by now. 20 gallon tank with 6 small fish but seems to be stuck. It has a topfin filter that will get modded with bioball bag and just the sponge after it gets established. We use charcol whole house filter with a softner and I dono if that's stalling it out. I still use the declorinator in the top off water and when we set it up. It seems wrong. I don't use the strip test kit but the master freshwater kit. What do you all think?

 

I don't think you should use the declorinater with fish in the water,but I am not sure.

 

Since you have fish, you should either be doing daily water changes, or buy Tetra Safe Start, add it to the water and then not change the water for two weeks. Doing weekly water changes during cycle is not enough to keep fish safe. They are eing poisoned by ammonia. If I were you, I would buy Tetra Safe Start (TSS) right away. Since you have six fish in there, which I think is more than recommended for cycling a 20 gallon tank, I would buy more Tetra Safe Start than is recommended for your tank size. I wonder whether the bioload is too large and that is causing your cycle to stall? TSS will provide you the beneficial bacteria which will hopefully start converting that ammonia to nitrites for you. Do not buy any other brand, TSS is the only one that is known to work I think.

Fish, especially zebra fish which are supposed to be very active, going really slowly is abad sign. I am not surprised though given that they are in an uncycled tank and you have neither added TSS not done daily water changes, so if I were you I would rectify that right away.

Seeded gravel is a good idea. If you could get some seeded filter media to put into your filter that would be even better. However, keep in minded that getting seeded media from a store is a risk, since stores often have illness in their tanks, since they have a lot of fish turnover and some fish just are ill.

you do know that the bacteria that are grown while cycling live primarily in the filter media? So if you modify the filter later on, make sure to keep the current filter stuff in there as well, do not just replace it with the bio balls or sponge or else you will be replacing filter media that have bacteria on them with uncycled filter media, and you may undo most of the cycling work.

You need to dechlorinate water with water conditioner if the water reaching the tank has chlorine or chloramine in it. I do not know whether your house filter would remove chlorine or not. I know charcoal neither removes chlorine nor adversely affects cycle, but something else in the filter maybe? Can you find out exactly what else your whole house filter does aside from charcoal, what kind of softener? What is the brand of this whole house water filter, maybe others here know about it?

If you have a water softener in the water supply, you probably ought to also buy the API KH and GH test kit and use it in addition to the API Master Test Kit. KH and GH in addition to PH will give you a more accurate picture than the PH alone. Basically, you ought to find out whether the water is so soft that you will need to do something to help you keep your pH stable. However, you say that your pH is currently 8.4 which is quite high, plus during cycle pH may be unstable and that is to be expected. I do not think that is causing the stalled cycle though. I know cycle stall when pH falls below 6, but I have not heard of it stalling due to high PH.

What is the temperature in your tank? You may want to find out what the maximum recommended temp for your fish is, and then very slowly over hours or days raise your temperature to be closer to that max than it is now (unless it already is high). Bacteria grow better in higher temps. However, you need to make sure to not have temps too high, and don't raise it too fast. Your fish are already very stressed as is, and you need to be careful now to reduce and not increase that stress.

good luck!

 

After thinking about it some more, I really think that you need to find out more about what that house filter does to your water. What brand is it?

 

its 78 to 79 temp wise. the filter is the whirlpool central filter and then also a whirlpool water softner. After setting up the two I got my water to read no clorine and soft instead of verry hard. There both only a year old. I was going to take out the carbon when I first cleaned it in tank water and add a bag of biomax with the filter. There active but the black fins arnt like the zibras. I add start right to the water changes and the top off water from the tap I need to get prime tho as I just read start right has salt in it for the slime coat.

 

I did a quick google search but could not find anything about whirlpool central filter interaction with aquarium, which could mean that the two are just rarely used together so there is not any info out there, or it could be a non-issue.

What I would do if I were you is get the Tetra Safe Start. Make sure to wait 24 hours after water change before adding the TSS. If I were you I would add more than recommended for your aquarium size because the recommendation is to cycle a 20 gallon just with three or four fish not with six fish - so since you have more fish you need more TSS. After you add the TSS wait 14 days before the next water change, but observe the fish. If the fish are not getting better than either TSS is not working or they may have been too far gone to recover or there may be other issues.

 

Does the water softener system use salt? Maybe if yes it's affecting the cycle?

Yes, always use dechlorinator w/ fish in the tank.

 

yep its the salt bassed.

 

well the test strips I got with the tank had kh and gh on them and they showed KH pegged 300 bright blue it only reads to 300 and gh at between 0 and 25 which is probubly why my ph is off the chart in the tank. would that much kh throw nitrites off? I did get prime and the bag of biomax for the aq30 and stuck it between the sponge and water exit on the topfin were top of the biomax is at the waterline all the way accros.