Ammonia won’t go away!

[Shilpan Patel]

hey guys I recently quarantined a sailfin tang in a 40gallon tank with a canister filter and SeaChem matrix and cupramine. I have cuprisorb sitting in there now and it’s slowly removing all the copper which is dropping each day.

During quarantine I used SeaChem ammonia multitest. I had problems with ammonia . I did cycle the tank but I kept getting readings of TOTAL ammonia around 0.05-0.15 and no free ammonia. I did many water changes to bring total ammonia down.

The fish has been out for 5 days now and no change on the ammonia level. But the total ammonia has been at 0.10 for probably 12 days in total now. Free ammonia is still reading 0. I haven’t been adding any food to the tank either.

How do I fix this stalled cycle? I want to cycle the tank for my next quarantine.

 

[Brew12]

hey guys I recently quarantined a sailfin tang in a 40gallon tank with a canister filter and SeaChem matrix and cupramine. I have cuprisorb sitting in there now and it’s slowly removing all the copper which is dropping each day.

During quarantine I used SeaChem ammonia multitest. I had problems with ammonia . I did cycle the tank but I kept getting readings of TOTAL ammonia around 0.05-0.15 and no free ammonia. I did many water changes to bring total ammonia down.

The fish has been out for 5 days now and no change on the ammonia level. But the total ammonia has been at 0.10 for probably 12 days in total now. Free ammonia is still reading 0. I haven’t been adding any food to the tank either.

How do I fix this stalled cycle? I want to cycle the tank for my next quarantine.

Your cycle isn't stalled and your system is just fine. Most test kits struggle to read very low levels of ammonia. It is likely that your system is actually as ammonia free as it will get.

 

[Shilpan Patel]

Ahh...
Ok thank you I’ll keep ghost feeding then to double check it doesn’t rise higher. Yay time to get that sand sifter this weekend!
That new fish excitement!