Wrong fish

The nitrite-consuming bacteria are slower growing than those that eat ammonia. Seems likely that the introduction of the fish caused a boost in ammonia that the bacteria wuickly caught up with, and the nitrite consumers are just lagging a bit behind.

If your test kit only reads to 200, anything above that is guess work. Could have been 250, could have been 500. Which means that doing water changes until it drops into the readable levels is the only way to know how much is in there. Since it seemed to rise after the water change, I would test the source water. Even if everyone says their water is perfect, I'm paranoid and would still test it myself to be certain.
 
Alright cool, I'll test my tap water when I get home. Should I do another water change, or should I give my nitrites a chance to settle down, as well as let my skimmer try to lower levels? I've been testing every 3 days, so should I wait til monday, test, and if my nitrates are still high do another change?
 
I tested my tap water, and the nitrates are a lot less than 10ppm, pretty much undetectable. I haven't been on the webboard since friday so I didn't know if I should do a water change til now, but I will do a change tonight. My yellow tail damsel now has a white film over one of his eyes, and the smaller of my 2 dominos' looks like it has a line of white along his body, and his color has slightly faded greyish around the area of the whilte line. My lfs said my first dead 3 stripe domino has an infection, not ich, and he said the others should be ok. Well now 1 more is dead and 2 of the other 3 look sick.It's probably due to my poor water quality. Hopefully a water change will help with my water quality, I'll test after it's done and post again tomorrow am.
 
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Normally, or for now, during the cycle? Normally, I would go with about 15-20 gallons. To help the fish deal with the spike, do as large a change as is needed to get those values down. This may involve doing a change of 20%, testing, and doing another change of 20%. Keep in mind--water changes are nothing but good, so even large ones are okay. I would probably start with a change of 50%, and then do smaller ones if needed.
 
Alright, so I'll go home and start stirring! The first water change i did was about 10-12 gallons, I'll up the ante this time, my nitrates were so high! I'll give you an update tomorrow morning, thanks for all the help oriongirl!!
 
Well I did a 25 gallon water change last night, waited an hour and re-tested afterwards. I dropped my salinity from 1.023 to 1.021, ammonia is still 0, nitrites are around .25 I think and nitrates are around 200 or so? My test kit is terrible, you have to look through the test tube and pick which color it most closely represents, but the colors on the test card are shades of red and my test tube looks purple-ish? So it's either you measure by color intensity, in which case the reading I gave here are the best fit, or the purple means it's that far off the scale?? I don't know, I might call my lfs and have them test my water? But I think they use the same kit they sold me? At any rate my yelow tail damsel had a real foggy eye with a white chunk of something on it, now it's just foggy and he's eating a bit more. I recently noticed some red threads coming out of my sand, look smaller than human hair. Also noticed what looks like a mini feather duster popping in and out of a white tube on a piece of my lr. And finally noticed some brownish hairy algae starting to cover my powerheads, lr and base rock, as well as some more reddish spots in my live sand.
 
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