Hi everyone, long story short had a big change around in my tank and have ended up with super high nitrites coming from an as yet unknown source, I'm happy to leave as is while I look for the culprit, all fish are now in another tank, but will the nitrites damage the good stuff in the filter if they reach a certain level?
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High Nitrites and filters
- Thread starter Dan1984
- Start date
Scaperinc
Member
Not really , can you post a picture of your nitrate test, also test your tap water , if tap water does not have too much do daily water changes and if you can cut your tap water with RO it will help futher.
Post pictures of tank and test results, whats the volume of your tank etc etc
Post pictures of tank and test results, whats the volume of your tank etc etc
Thanks for replying so quickly,Yeah I have been doing the water changes with RO cut water, no nitrites in the tap water at all, at the moment the test results are off the charts in terms of the liquid tests so over 8ppm, but whenever I get the nitrites down they shoot straight back up again. I think I know what the problem is, but I just didn't want take my time over sorting it, only to have ruined my filter bacteria by leaving it too long dealing with such high nitrite levels
Scaperinc
Member
Apologies it was late night i miss read - will i think something has crashed your cycle, you have saved all the fish so i would just leave it as it is and let the cycle complete again
Use this below Tutorial.
Using stem plants as a filtering aid at Start Up!
Using stem plants as a filtering aid at Start Up!
Mike Singh
Member
Hi
Give us the sort version of your story. Did you add the brown substrate on top the darker one recently?
No I removed all of the substrate, and put new substrate and plants in. I also pretty much halved the stocking at the same time, so I'm guessing that the remaining filter bacteria either still wasn't enough to sustain the fish or a lot of it died while the filter was off.
The thing that worries me is that even without fish in there I can get the nitrites down to 0.5ppm but within 2 hours or so they shoot right back up
The thing that worries me is that even without fish in there I can get the nitrites down to 0.5ppm but within 2 hours or so they shoot right back up
No problem at all I'm just grateful for the help!
If your new substrate is a plant soil it’s likely that’s leaching a mass of ammonia that your filter is struggling to process fast enough.
As far as I know your only option is to wait it out with lots of water changes and perhaps add even more fast growing stem plants and some floaters.
