Done cycling?

[axys]

So its been a little over a month since my tank cycle crashed and i had to start a new. i have the nice api water test kit. school work has been heavy so shamefully i did not keep up well with getting the parameters of the tank every couple of days. last time i measured it it was about 2 weeks ago, it was 4 ammonia and 0 of the other 2. today when i measured it i was really excited bc the ammonia is at 0 or .25 (the difference in color is very difficult to tell but im leaning towards yellow therefore 0). the nitrite is also at 0 YAYYYYYY!!!! but then the nitrate is also at 0? wht? i thought when the first two hit 0 nitrate was suppose to go up since its the end product of the other two conversions.

my question is does anyone know whts going on. I currently have 3 gold fish in the tank as ammonia resource (i grew very very fond of them over the month so i will definitely keep them as pets in their own tank when the axolotl is back in her tank. so the point of the last sentence was, there is ammonia being created daily in the tank therefore how can there be 0 of everything? is my filter just magically so good that it somehow removes all nitrites? do 3 goldfish not produce enough waste to cause detectable levels of nitrites? i am sure i added the right testing stuff so i dont think the test itself is inaccurate...

some help would be appreciated bc im very much so looking forward to having my axolotl back in her tank with me in my room and not at school anymore. thanks in advance

 

[Xtophr]

Are you saying you had three fish in the tank when the ammonia was 4 ppm? Did you change the water after that?

How often do you do water changes? And how much water do you change out?

How big is the tank (water volume)?

How big are the fish (inches)?

Do you have plants?

Do you treat the water with anything that claims to 'eliminate' or 'neutralize' ammonia, etc.?

Do you use purigen or another filtration media that claims the same?

 

[Cacique]

Can't tell how the cycle is going really, I think you just need to test it until you see the ~40ppm Nitrates.

Are these goldfish single or double tail variety? I hate to break it to you but for a double tail or fancy goldfish, you need at LEAST 20 gallons for the first fish, 10 for each fish after that. If they are single tail variety, like the comet or common feeder goldfish, then you actually need a pond. Fancy goldfish can grow up to 8 inches and need the space to move. A single tail or comet goldfish can grow to be around a foot long and will need easily 100 gallon pond. You should basically treat single tail goldfish like koi.

Also, while goldfish might be a hardy fish, they are still sensitive to the water parameters and will still find ammonia toxic. I would do my best at keeping the ammonia down to 0 so they don't suffer from it. A tank too small will stunt their growth and they won't have enough room to move, so if they are single tail and you don't have the room for a large enough tank you might consider searching for someone with a pond to re-home them with. They would be fine with koi from what I've read in case you were wondering.

I have a fancy goldfish myself and they grow quite fast and learned all this information about them and the single tailed goldfish when I did all my research, so I figured I would share.

 

[axys]

no im aware of the harm ammonia can do to goldfish, the first 2 weeks i used fish food as my ammonia source but it was messy and unreliable and i so i decided to add goldfish (double tail).

also idk if this s useful info or not but i added filter media from an already established tank

i measured the 4ppm ammonia before i added the goldfish to make sure that it wasnt something that would harm them, i did a 90 percent water change before i added them in (all the water except the one in the sand. and after that daily 50 percent water changes. like i said the last 2 weeks i did not measure the parameters.

they are 3 one inch long goldfish in a 20 gallon long tank

 

[Boomsloth]

no im aware of the harm ammonia can do to goldfish, the first 2 weeks i used fish food as my ammonia source but it was messy and unreliable and i so i decided to add goldfish (double tail).

also idk if this s useful info or not but i added filter media from an already established tank

i measured the 4ppm ammonia before i added the goldfish to make sure that it wasnt something that would harm them, i did a 90 percent water change before i added them in (all the water except the one in the sand. and after that daily 50 percent water changes. like i said the last 2 weeks i did not measure the parameters.

they are 3 one inch long goldfish in a 20 gallon long tank

you should always be checking the parameters when doing any type of cycle with live animals in the water. Goldfish are just as messy as axolotls (goldfish produce lots of waste regardless of how many tails) so it would have been better to just stick with the fish food. if your ammonia was spiking to 2ppm every day and you were only performing a 50% change you leave 1ppm ammonia so after 2 weeks the ammonia could easily have reached dangerous levels. A tank is done cycling when ammonia and nitrite hit zero, anything else suggests something went wrong.

 

[Cacique]

Only thing I can add is that 3 goldfish should be more than enough on ammonia. The 20 long would work for 1 goldfish, but it would be the smaller sized tank recommendation, so the ammonia should definitely be there. If you are able to I would recommend a 55 gallon whenever you're shopping for a tank for the goldfish if you can, great space to watch them swim around, they can be quite active.

 

[axys]

the 1 dollar per gallon sale is still on till tomorrow so i will consider that, i think im giving one away to my biology teacher who has a nice set up (her room is literally a zoo) and keeping the other two. i would probably upgrade my two turtles into the 55g and the goldfish into the 40g breeder

 

[Xtophr]

Well, a 90% water change of a tank at 4ppm will yield a tank at .4 ppm, which is still kinda high. But you said everything but what was in the sand, so that might be more than 90%.

However, if you change 50% of the water each day, and had no fish, you'd halve it each day after.

I don't know how many ppm/day/gallon of ammonia that three 1 inch goldfish will produce. I can tell you that four 1 inch platies produce almost nothing ammonia wise in a 20 gallon per day.

Where you might start getting into trouble would be when the ammonia starts converting to nitrite. The 'ppm' measurement is really mg/L. The atomic mass of ammonia is 17, whereas the atomic mass of nitrite is 46; almost triple. So '1 ppm' of ammonia will convert to ~ '3ppm' of nitrite. .5 of ammonia is borderline OK, but that translates to 1.5 nitrite, which is definitely not OK.

I take it you're not using any of the additives I asked about.

However, since you're using seeding material, you're doing 50% water changes every day, and that you say you're not seeing anything at all, I'd guess that either you're not cycling at all or you're cycling ammonia->nitrate.

The reason I'd guess that is the API nitrite test kits are *easy* to tell if there's any amount other than zero, and also due to the ratio of masses of ammonia and nitrite. In addition, it's harder to read the nitrates, and they are also on a higher scale; 0->5 versus 0->.25). You could be removing enough nitrates with your PWCs to keep from getting a clear read on them.

If it's not cycling at all, you could be removing enough ammonia to make nitrates hard to read, with, say, platies, but I took a pass on goldfish/koi due to not wanting a foot long fish so I couldn't say.

The way to tell would be to test at least daily, and perhaps decrease the volume of the water changes, but be careful.