If you are doing daily water changes then you are replacing the water with tap water that already reads at 1ppm so it will probably continue too read at 1ppm plus you are doing a fishy cycle that is adding more ammonia to the ammonia that is already present in your tap water .... Try dosing with Prime at twice the dose and give it 24-48 hours and do a reading...
Ammonia will not go down
- Thread starter svns gunner
- Start date
My tap has 1.0 ppm of ammonia in it. I used to buy water for changes but that gets expensive when you are running a 55, 20, and 10 gallon tanks (I used to have more!). Now I use an empty 20 and 10 gallon tank each with a cheap Hang on the back filter to break down the ammonia and when it is time for my weekly change ammonia and nitrites are zero. You could get a 10 gallon tank and a cheap filter for about $20-25 if that holds enough for water changes.. Oh, and if chloramines are your source of ammonia, treat the empty tank with prime so it doesn't kill off the bacteria in the filter.
How are you seeding the filter each time for water changes? Looks like the nitrate levels in the water change tank would be high...and seems like it would be like me doing a water change but then turning around and putting the same water back in since I do them to reduce nitrate levels in my tank so if I am replacing water with 30ppm nitrates with more water with say 30ppm nitrates I am really defeating the purpose
Maybe I wasn't very clear with my description... I am not re-using water from my tanks containing fish. For example, today I am doing water changes. The empty tanks I am taking water out of is water from my tap one week ago today and had 1.0 ppm of ammonia, 0 ppm of nitirite and 5.0 ppm of nitrate. Today after running with the HOB filter for a week the ammonia is 0, nitrite is 0 and nitrate is less than 10, slightly more than 5.
I find that refilling the empty tanks with my tap provides enough ammonia to keep enough bacteria alive to break it down to nitrate in a day or two.. no seeding necessary. The important thing is to make sure I do this once a week.
