Water change during "recycle"?

[kurono]

Hello everyone, i woke up this morning to find my water a bit cloudy.
so i proceeded to do water tests. at first i thought maybe i dosed too much calcium but the results were as follows.

dkh-11
cal-440
ph-7.8
phos-0

upon further research i discovered it may be a bacteria bloom. i thought how could this be? the tank has been established for over a year now.
so i tested the other big 3 and was shocked at the results.

Ammonia - 1.0ppm
Nitrite - 1.0ppm
Nitrate - 10ppm (was normally close to 0)

so now i have this recycle happening and not sure if i should water change or wait it out.
corals look distressed, fish seems fine for now but its only been 1 day.

thinking back i did a water change about an hour after feeding the tank and replaced all my filter floss that's been in the tank for a bit too long.
is it possible that some bacteria established itself on the filter floss and removing it made the population not be able to handle the bio load i added during feeding?

any advice,insight, or idea is greatly appreciated.

 

[Reefing Madness]

Filter bacteria shouldn't have been big enough to have impacted the system, unless we are talking about a small system.
Your going to have to do some water changes to get those numbers down, and keep them there, while you wait it out.

 

[gtbarsi]

Are you sure you did not loose one of your fish or other livestock, viable bacterial blooms are not typical for the bacteria responsible for breaking down ammonia, or it's derivatives. It is typical for the bacteria responsible for breaking down tissue into ammonia. I recommend you search your tank for you ammonia source, and remove it ASAP. Water changes are definitely called for I would go for 10-20% at a time until things are back to normal. You might consider treating your water with a product like prime to try and neutralize the excess ammonia, and other nutrients. Once immediately while you get more water mixed, test every 24 hours and if you are still registering high numbers treat again.

 

[kurono]

Thank you for your responses. I'm in the process of doing a 20% water change now. Hopefully I can get this under control soon before I have any losses. So far I have all my critters accounted for. Which brings up the question how is it possible my bio load jumped so high as to start this cycle? The only explanation I can think of is Iast week I had a pretty severe Cyanobacteria outbreak, it covered about 80% of the sandbed. My phosphate was pretty high so I decided to to get a gfo reactor to combat the problem. Seems it worked because most of the cyano started to die off pretty quickly. Could this die off triggered the cycle?

 

[Reefing Madness]

AH, GFO. If you put in the full load all at once, and have not run it before, this can somtimes cause issues. May be the culprit, may not.

 

[ravi197699]

this is very strange since your tank is a year old and all of sudden you have these spikes, did you move your rock work around and is there any live rock in your sump that you moved to clean up under, because this can cause spikes since since things get stirred up, It has happened to me once while I was cleaning up my sump and moved rock around to clean up under.......

 

[kurono]

No sump, it's a very small tank, 7 gallon cube. I did some research on gfo and I guess I did drop the ball on that one. I used way too much and probably dropped the phosphate too fast. I haven't found any information on gfo causing ammonia spikes though. Is it possible that the sudden lack of phosphate caused some beneficial bacteria to die? Does that even make sense? Still kinda new the hobby and I feel like my tank is the mascot for Murphys law. Lol but that's why I'm here because I'm not going to give up. Again thanks for the input, much appreciated.