I've been struggling with a cycle crash and my ammonia and nitrites have been stuck at .25ppm. I tested my PH yesterday and it was reading this. I did a massive water change and brought it down to 7.4 then tossed in almond leaves to hopefully help bring it down
I get home from work and it's spiked back up again as in the photo.
It's like no mater how many water changes I do, or how much prime I add, even if I add almond leaves nothing is fixing my parameters. I don’t know what to do anymore. I am exhausted trying to figure this out.
Posted by Glasses_Cat
17 Comments
Is this a fishlessor fish in cycle?
Have you tried driftwood? No fish?
What’s in the tank, as far as hardscape, livestock, substrate, etc?
I thought ph doesn’t matter ? As long as it’s the same the whole time
It must be something in the tank. What is in the tank?
Every time it reads .25 dose prime for the whole tank and it neutralizes ammonia and nitrite temporarily for like Two days. Then dose again if it’s still reading .25 for both ammonia. And nitrite. If it reaches .5 for either or that’s when you change the water by half, have patience you’ll get there 🙏
Are you using tap water? That’s likely the cause for high ph. If the water is hard no matter how much almond leaves you put in it will never go low. What you need to do is start using RO water.
Adding RO water can lower the ph, so maybe try doing a water change with some of that, and try to get to the levels youre looking for. tap water has minerals in it so normally a mix of dechlorinated tap water and RO water can balance your levels or I use pure RO water and remineralize with drops that have minerals in them to get the desired levels. Or, tannins also naturally lower ph.
What’s your ph from the tap? try putting some tapwater into a cup test it when you first pour into the cup and test it 24 hours later. If It’s low, you need to troubleshoot your fish tank it’s likely the Hardscape I had this issue
Test tap water, if its fine then something in your tank is causing that
Test TDS and your KH levels. If you have a massive amount of carbonates then that’s what’s pulling your pH so high up, even after changing water.
If your KH is high then the next question is what’s in your tank that’s dissolving carbonates?
You need to use RO water, to some degree. That’ll be up to you to figure out. I’d start off with a 20% water change using ro/di water
I just fill my tanks with gallon distilled water from the store. Takes longer to get the cycle going but I haven’t had an issue with PH since.
You shouldn’t even be doing water changes. Time is your only ally, no product will expedite or help. Bacteria that will eat ammonia needs to grow, bacteria that eats nitrites need to grow. I’ll go ahead and argue you may be stalling your cycle by doing too much like a water change. I personally don’t even bother with these test kits. Smell test is your tool. Smells like windex? It’s not done yet. Smells *alive* like when you walk into a fish store? You’re okay to add a few and small fish, and feed small every few days. Fish keeping is a patient persons hobby. The build up and delayed gratification is worth it.
The wrong type of stone can really screw with your water.
You’ve had a few good notes here. To add my bit:
1) this is probably a hardness issue.
2) the almond leaves won’t do much of anything in hard water.
I suspect the sand is the culprit, which is unfortunate because it’s a lot of work to take it all out and replace it.
You mentioned the bath tap having the higher ph. Does it use a different water heater? Or is the other tap not run through a water heater?
A friend was having issues with their water (not fish keeping) and ended up getting a tankless water heater. When their old tanked water heater was taken apart (by her husband) it was absolutely full of a mineral heavy sludge. Some kinds of water heater need to be flushed every year or so, to get rid of mineral build up.