Help! Ammonia levels not going down!

With that stock in a planted tank you shouldn't have any ammona by the plants alone. A few guesses would be overfeeding or something(food maybe) somewhere decomposing. Another strong possibility is your tap water has ammonia in some form or another in it.
Lastly it could be a false positive, but i think that's less lilely than the other guesses.

Yep, I checked all that first thing. Source water measures zero ammonia, zero nitrires and about under 5 nitrates. I fed twice a day fine for months but this month I've cute it down a ton since I saw the level up, it happened pretty suddenly so I thought i killed the cycle on accident but its still not cycling but making its own nitrates fine? They get only either half a frozen food cube or a tiny pinch of bug bites once a day and its gone in under a few minutes. All fish accounted for, vacuumed every 3 days but nothing comes up really. I checked the mts and they seem alive and active. So I'm left thinking something is either messing with the cycle or remnants of the amguard messing with results or a bad test. I've put nothing in it but prime this week. Would ferts raise ammonia? I did start using nilocg this month instead of flourish but I'm dosing only a squirt once a week which is only half a dose for a 20 and weekly recommended amount was 2 to 3 times a week.

 

No, ferts should have the opposite effect since plants use ammonia more readily than nitrate or nitrite and the ferts will help them do so. Also, no aquatic ferts I've ever heard of use ammonia. And i know thrive doesn't. If you aren't doing water changes with prime, the ammonia will be detoxified, but not removed so it will still show up and build up.
Another possibility is a cleaning solution of sorts contaminating something accidentally making its way into the water.
How old is your test kit? I know they have somewhat of a shelf life, but it seems your kit is still accurate.
The only other thing i can think of is lack of filtration, but that only really makes sense for something like goldfish due to their substantial bioload for their size. Maybe getting a bigger filter to add to the setup would be an option.

 

Yea, i misread and thought you were using prime and not a binding agent. Those are garbage. The only ones worth using are for cleaning up suspended particles when you put in new substrate and don't want to wait an eternity for things to settle.

 

Yea rn I'm only using prime, I used amguard last week cause I was panicking it read 1 ammonia still but I've just been doing larger water changes and prime now. They have 2 filters one on each end rated for 20gs, flow looks good, bio media and zeolite sponge. One filter is 6 months cylced and the second I just added when this started so I had room for zeolite and extra bio stuff thinkimg I killed the filter. They have a decent amount of plants too, hair grass, 3 anubius, 3 ar rosefolia, 50% cover of floaters, i make extra sure there's no dead leaves every change too. Test i bought this year but I'll try to find a date.

 

Thats plenty of filtration. I've definitely done more with less.
How exactly do you think you killed the filter? The bb is pretty resilient. I use regular tapwater to clean my filters(don't do this) without issue all the time.(big tanks low stock, several filters, none cleaned at the same time)
Snails can live in really nasty water quite well, so i wouldn't use them as any sort of gauge, but if you have a very large amount of them, they could be contributing to the problem.

 

When it started I had the one filter and had thrown out the carbon pack cause it was looking icky and was in there for a while so I put a fresh one in and thought I was ok with the 2 big filter sponges and bio balls so I rinsed then in old tank water but pretty vigorously so o didn't know if I killed it. When I do water changes too I ad the amount of prime needed for the 10 gallons I'm changing but it gets added sometimes divided as much as I can into each gallon but sometimes I just put it in first then add the new water. But its filtered well water so shouldn't have chlorine to my knowledge. How long does it take for a mini cycle to be done? Would 2 to 3 weeks be enough? It looks better this week just still not going away lol. And I checked the expiration of the test snd it says good til 2024.

 

Often when going through a mini cycle in a previously cycled tank you won't get a high spike in nitrites so I wouldn't be concerned about not seeing any while going through this.

As long as the ammonia level is below one I wouldn't do a water change. Everyone that knows me knows I am a stickler for water changes but there are times when we need to just let our tanks do their thing.

Knowing you have Prime allows me to suggest holding off on water changes for a few days. If the ammonia stays below one just add Prime every 3rd day. Go ahead and do your normal weekly water change though. If you don't normally change out 50% of the water each week I will recommend you do so each week until this mini cycle is complete. Of course if the ammonia goes above one I will recommend you do a water change to get it back below one.

I will ask though. How much water have you changed since the last time you added amguard? I want to be sure you have changed out enough to have removed all of it. I don't know how long it keeps the ammonia bound so we want to be sure it is all out of there. We want the bacteria to be able to eat the ammonia and if it is bound I'm not sure it can. If you feel you haven't gotten most of it out of there then I would recommend you do a big water change, meaning as much as you can without stressing your fish and go forward from there.

 

Thank you! I'll definitely try that. Before this o would do a 25 to 50% change every weekend, however much i needed to change to vacuum which is between 5 and 10 gallons. After this happened I was doing a 50% ever 2 days then 25% a day. I did 2 50% changes since I stopped the amguard. I think you may be right because before it was looking like a 1 to 2 ammonia even though I was changing so much water and vaccuming and not feeding so maybe the amguard messed it up more. It definitely looks better now but still reading it. Does the test look like .50 or 1? And thank you again for all the help! Hopefully all the extra media I added keeps it from any more cycle mishaps. And good to know it doesn't do a lot of nitrites for a mini one, I was testing every other day watching for one.

 

Thank you! I'll definitely try that. Before this o would do a 25 to 50% change every weekend, however much i needed to change to vacuum which is between 5 and 10 gallons. After this happened I was doing a 50% ever 2 days then 25% a day. I did 2 50% changes since I stopped the amguard. I think you may be right because before it was looking like a 1 to 2 ammonia even though I was changing so much water and vaccuming and not feeding so maybe the amguard messed it up more. It definitely looks better now but still reading it. Does the test look like .50 or 1? And thank you again for all the help! Hopefully all the extra media I added keeps it from any more cycle mishaps. And good to know it doesn't do a lot of nitrites for a mini one, I was testing every other day watching for one.

You are so very welcome. Hopefully this will get this tank back in track. It is difficult for me to tell. It could be one or it could be .75. It does look to be over ,5 though.