Water spike

[Gary Anderson]

Added 15 Catfish to my system today. Haven't checked water in a couple or 3 days. Checked it today and i have a spike from 0 ammonia to 1ppm. and 0 nitrites to 2ppm. System is about a month old. I'm new to this and not sure what to do. I changed out about 50 gallons of water from my 220 gallon tank and added 5 teaspoons of ClorAm-X. Any ideas out there?  Thanks in advance.

[nimrod bash]

first thing first , how long u test the water after feeding ?

assuming the fish consume all the feed

1 ppm NH3 in one test is no biggy ofc it's not ideal but changing the water is a drastic means to save the pop machines

first of all if u suspect something is wrong stop feeding , a week with no food is nothing out of the ordinary for most

fish , from experience a month without food for carp's is no death sentence ether to get things in proportion for u ...

NH3/NO2 amounts will b highest between 4 to 8 hours after feeding and it is acceptable to have up to 2 ppm NH3/NO2

if u had more then 0.25 ppm of NH3/NO2 24 hours after feeding that's a completely different thing and you should

stop feeding and maybe look for decaying organic matter (fish algae etc ...) that may flood the water with nitrogen

ether way u shodent change water unless there is over 3 ppm of NH3/NO2 24 hours after feeding

after all the problem is the bacteria in the system not processing the nitrogen

in a sufficient rate and not the water , concentrations of different forms of nitrogen in the water give us

just a small part of the nitrogen cycle in the system and we should always keep that in mind ...

[Gary Anderson]

Filled test tubes before i fed. This tank had never showed much problem so i was caught by surprise. Need to be more careful, i guess. Thanks for the info, Nimrod. Will quit feeding and watch for a while.