Returning to Fish keeping with Fluval Edge

Just tested before getting into bed. Nitrites are purple again, and nitrates are 5ppm. Not sure what happened over night, I'm thinking I shouldn't have done the WC until a week or so after addition of the stock. Pretty bummed expecting some dead inverts in the am.


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The water change isn't going to have a negative impact on the cycling, so you can take some solace from that.

I've heard (but haven't seen, thankfully) that sometimes the readings are so far off the charts, the results go from the darkest shade to the lightest shade very quickly, giving an inaccurate reading of 0 at the end of the wait time for results.

I've been lucky that I haven't had to cycle from scratch since I set up my 55.
 
So bummed out. I pretty much lead those skrimps to the slaughter. Feel like breaking the entire thing down. Probably go home after work, do a 50% water change (disposing of skrimp corpses as I do) and break the ammonia back out. What a drag.


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I'd just say wait for a few days of good readings before adding anything, preferably a week. By taking multiple readings, you're more likely to catch any anomalies. It's easy to get excited and rush things. That's how I killed off something in the neighborhood of 200 RCS of my own.

Oh, and in case this turns out to be an issue for you once you're up and running, lots of small water changes on a tank that size with shrimp. I was getting inexplicable deaths, even after I got the cycle reestablished (I nuked the bio filter on accident) and Rachel O'Leary, as in MsJinkzd, recommended that I stop doing the ~40% weekly water changes, and switch to ~10% 3-4 times weekly. I have only had one death since then, and am actually doing ~15% every other day. It's only been a couple weeks, but I had been finding one or two dead per week, and since that's the only thing that I changed, it's likely that's the fix. I've also started it on my betta tank on Monday, since I put snails in there for a CUC, and they keep dying, but he ignores them when they're alive, so it's probably a similar situation, and not just him killing them.
 
Thanks guys took a couple hours to get over my feelings of wanting to quit. I may just leave shrimp out of the equation if it means doing water changes every other day. Once a week is enough for me. Maybe 8-10 CPDs and that's it.


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So I just CORRECTLY ran water tests (just getting in) and I'm showing 0 ammonia, nitrites off the charts, yet 5ppm nitrates. How is that possible? I thought once nitrates hit, nitrites were supposed to be gone. Not sure if I should add ammonia at this point or not. Might have time to run another test and dose with ammonia in the morning if that's the advice I receive from you guys at this point. Won't have time to change water until tomorrow night. Dear lord let this get better.


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