Poisonous water + tank redecoration = horror!

beatle said:

I redecorated my betta's 3g tank on Friday. I took out the sand, fake wood, fake plants, and foam prefilter on the filter intake. I replaced it with new gravel, african root wood, and removed the prefilter. The only thing that remained the same was the biowheel, filter cartridge, and the java fern. The root wood has started to release some tannins into the water, but it's not so bad. I kind of like the look.

My betta looked a little sickly today so I checked the water:

Ammonia - 1.0
Nitrite - 5.0!
Nitrate - 80?

I really don't know why these things would be so high. The filter was rinsed in the tank water. I didn't touch the biowheel. All water going in was treated with Prime, just like my other tanks. My otocinclus doesn't seem to care.

Now, I did as big of a water change as I could with the fish still in the tank, then I retested the water. With the exception of the ammonia
(it's now 0.5), all the parameters are the same! I bet you're wondering what my treated tap water looks like. I was too:

Ammonia - 0.25
Nitrite - 2.0
Nitrate - 10

This is terrifying, as I am in the process of setting up a 90g for my African cichlids. I don't want to dump them into a tank full of toxic waste!

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Contact an LFS ASAP to find out if they sell Reverse Osmosis water. My LFS (Big Al's) sells it for 99 cents/gallon. Kind of pricey but its excellent for plants and fish.

I suspect by removing all the items, except the bio wheel and filter, you may have removed a chunk of the biological.

I hear a lot of folks say thet there isn't that much on the media..but if you think about it, the oxegenated surface of the substrate is actually pretty large..if you had a 12"x12" tank that equals 144 sq inches. that does notinclude anthing below the surface of the substate..it's going to take a little bit of time to replenish the bacteria. things should sart to even out fairly quickly since you have seeded material..
by changing out everything you in essence would be similar to starting a fresh tank with seed material.

you need a base to compare to..i would test the untreated tap water..

you can compare that to your treated tapwater.
prime may have something in there that may be throwing your readings off.

.99 cents a gallon? WOW that's like $90 to fill up the 90Gallon. I bought a RO/DI from www.airwaterice.com and it was $199.99. it's the reef version but also bought the $60+ drinking water conversion kit (goose neck faucet, 3.5G holding tank and finishing filter) everything's auto and we have RO water and the fish get RO/DI (saltwater) and it's great to top off with. if your going to use it on FW you will need to add some stuff to it, it's just too pure for FW fish.

My first question would be how long has the tank been up? If has been up a while and you have used the same tap water and you have stayed fairly consistent on frequency and amount when you change your water, I would say that your tanks bio filter has accounted for the ammonia in your tap water. I hear mixed opinions on how much bacteria lives in your substrate, but with a complete change I wouldnt count it out, not to mention the prefilter you replaced. It sounds to me like your experiencing a mini cycle, I give it a week until your levels stabilize.

I'll leave you with a quote I like to use from Duece Bigalow Male Gigalo "...but I have been wrong before."

star_rider said:

I suspect by removing all the items, except the bio wheel and filter, you may have removed a chunk of the biological.

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that sounds like the problem to me,

also while that tank was emptie did you give it a good washing on the inside ?

what did you using ?

Prime, like Amquel, claims to detoxify nitrite, ammonia, and nitrate. That is not to say it removes it, but renders it somehow "safe" for the fish until your biofilter makes it go away.

It is also said that sometimes these treatments give a false positive reading on tests. So try testing your straight, untreated tapwater to make sure this isn't the case here. I just did this for you using Amquel, and my raw tapwater had no ammonia but my freshly treated water had a "reading" off the chart.

Either way, don't worry about it - if your Cichlid tank is well cycled, that amount of ammonia and nitrite will be consumed within hours, maybe even less. There is really no reason to waste your money on RO water for freshwater fish unless your tapwater is seriously polluted or seriously off the acceptable charts for fish to live in. Those readings are perfectly fine for tapwater if your tank has a well functioning biofilter.

To make sure of this I was just nice enough to test the water in my fishless-ly cycling mbuna tank. This evening (about 5 hours ago) I dumped in a profuse amount of ammonia (I'm trying to build a huge colony) and the subsequent reading was pretty much urine - off the chart. Now it's testing at around 4ppm. So I think it's safe to say that .25 ppm will be gone in minutes.

Also R/O water contains no salts or minerals so you would just have to replace those to have healthy fish.

Please do test the untreated tapwater and let us know. The biofilter was probably hurt but should recover quickly

If your tapwater is actually that bad then I would contact the water dept and find out what is up as that doesn't sound like very safe water.

I think when you took all the sand out you took most of the biological as well. a lot of your bacteria live in that substrate and you probably lost most of them by putting in new gravel. fortunately since you left your biowheel in you still had some going on so it probably needed to catch up, which might be why it's looking a little better today.

do water changes to keep your nitrite levels below 0.5ppm until they go away completely and then your biological has probably recovered

good luck!