Ammonium/Ammonia Help

[joelat]

I have recently set up my 130 litre tank following a power outage last year which wiped out my tank. It has been running now around 2 weeks and i have been doing daily water tests to see where things are. When tested at my LFS i show high ammonia at 1.3. However i have tested NH3 and NH4 seperatley and my Nh3 reading is almost zero but my NH4 is 0.6 which is high, but i thought NH4 was non harmful. Can someone give me a little guidance here please.

 

[brandon429]

Yes, you are done is the bet. Post a pic of your tank

tank pics are more important than the estimates gained from non digital testing of ammonia.


Id think you are done because on the entire site, there aren’t any cycles in progress, they’re all done. Those who feel not done aren’t using a calibrated seneye tester, they’re using a tester shown in searches to misread on thousands of fully normal running reef tanks.

list how you cycled

 

[joelat]

I’ll post when I’m home, I was about to do a fish in cycle with Dr Tim’s however i noticed these levels fairly quickly. I have added 2x dr Tim’s and a bottle of colony also.

 

[brandon429]

Notice this forty page trend

How to unstick any seemingly stuck cycle

Updated Cycling Science in Action This is a testless reef tank cycling thread, the only one from any board. If you ever had trouble with reef tank cycling in the past, you won't any longer after working some jobs with us. chances are you are using/about to use a method of reef tank cycling...

www.reef2reef.com

specifically, people who thought their cycle was stalled were done vs being stalled. The thing that seems the most impossible given your stated non seneye readings is the most likely thing, that your cycle is done by rule of submersion timing. Anything approaching ten days running with a standard cycle mix of any common variation means cycled.


in that thread, we are still searching three years ongoing for evidence of a single persons cycle not being ready right when they posted it didn’t look ready. You have mentioned the disparity among test kits, that’s the heart of our study. We use objective # of days underwater vs subjective color guesses is why our results are perfect.


two weeks is beyond the # of days we’ve been testing there for three years. If you aren’t cycled, it’s the unicorn we have been looking for and non digital ammonia tests won’t be the deciding factor. We can put a test load into the tank and it will live, will be the proof.

 

[joelat]

 

[brandon429]

How did you add ammonia to the system

thats plenty of contact surface area for the stew.

can u post a pic in white lights, reason why: want to see if there are green or brown haze growths on the glass or surfaces

anything green or brown in a reef tank that grew there during a cycle comes after filter bacteria were established. It’s fun to practice visual cue tracking to close out cycles vs using any test kit, including digital ones.

 

[joelat]

Notice this forty page trend

How to unstick any seemingly stuck cycle

Updated Cycling Science in Action This is a testless reef tank cycling thread, the only one from any board. If you ever had trouble with reef tank cycling in the past, you won't any longer after working some jobs with us. chances are you are using/about to use a method of reef tank cycling...

www.reef2reef.com

specifically, people who thought their cycle was stalled were done vs being stalled. The thing that seems the most impossible given your stated non seneye readings is the most likely thing, that your cycle is done by rule of submersion timing. Anything approaching ten days running with a standard cycle mix of any common variation means cycled.


in that thread, we are still searching three years ongoing for evidence of a single persons cycle not being ready right when they posted it didn’t look ready. You have mentioned the disparity among test kits, that’s the heart of our study. We use objective # of days underwater vs subjective color guesses is why our results are perfect.


two weeks is beyond the # of days we’ve been testing there for three years. If you aren’t cycled, it’s the unicorn we have been looking for and non digital ammonia tests won’t be the deciding factor. We can put a test load into the tank and it will live, will be the proof.

This has got me a bit confused, are we saying the test kits are wrong and it should be ok?

 

[joelat]

How did you add ammonia to the system

i Assume this came as a result of the Bacteria i added to the system on set up?

 

[brandon429]

The bottle bacteria and ammonia aren’t packaged together

Post a tank pic in white light we might get lucky in seeing the green vs brown growths many tanks show by week 2

yes for sure, non digital ammonia test kits get things wrong such that we can track forty pages worth in one thread alone, so we developed testless ways of knowing when a cycle is complete. Even if you didn’t directly add food, some food got in anyway…homes actively exchange both food and bacteria with large open containers of heated/swirling water, there’s a contamination component at work for all cycles

and, waiting just about this long covers the atypical cycle where a large amount of ammonia might not have been added at the start, people add both the bacteria and a food source typically at the start.

 

[joelat]

The bottle bacteria and ammonia aren’t packaged together

Post a tank pic in white light we might get lucky in seeing the green vs brown growths many tanks show by week 2

yes for sure, non digital ammonia test kits get things wrong such that we can track forty pages worth in one thread alone.

Is there a more accurate way to test, I have a seachem ammonia alert in there too which is reading far below what the stores Digital tester said.

I don’t seem to have any kind of growth as far as i can see.

 

[brandon429]

you can easily ensure the cycle completes by just adding ground up fish food, any type, ground into powder and waiting five more days. That’s well beyond the wait time we use, only now with a full booster in place. Your tank would carry life right now, adding bottle bac to an aquarium and nothing else doesn’t kill bacteria anymore so than unfed bacteria sitting in the bottle awaiting to be dosed faces, it would carry fish if added just like any other tank from the thread. The reason you’re feeding is just to spend the next few days reading up on fish disease preps, fallow and quarantine, before adding fish.


we wouldn’t need any testing to finalize your cycle. If you added fish they’d live because bottle bac works even if delayed in feed, and doubly because adding a ground up pinch of food and waiting five days seats in the bacteria even further. Easy fix here, with no testing required.

 

[joelat]

So i should add a pinch of food and just wait it out? This should drop my NH4 enough to bring my total ammonia down. Never had any issues with setting up new tanks in the past but this one has been a bit of a learning curve

 

[brandon429]

Yes its add the food ground up, wait five days and begin reefing not factoring what the test kits say. If they say elevated ammonia, they’ve said it when you hadn’t added any as well, we wouldn’t factor them. You can simply reef as planned give it five more days.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

I discuss the relationship between ammonia and ammonium and a lot of other details about them here:

Ammonia and the Reef Aquarium by Randy Holmes-Farley - Reefkeeping.com