My nitrite sky rocketed over night, literally. The odd part is that nitrate is WNL, and ammonia non existent... literally no change in anything over the night... except the nitrite. I have a hunch that it could be some tablets (three) that i added to the substrate about a week ago, finally coming apart... but over all everything looks good. The fisharoos have been shifted to the 10 gal holding tank (along with the shrimp) until the LFS opens and i can get my restock on conditioner. Got a water change 5 hours earlier than i expected to!

Any thoughts aside form the tablets that would cause nitrites to spike so suddenly?

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Is this a cycled tank or a relatively new setup?

Root tablets don't usually ever cause nitrite. There's more to this mystery than that. What kind of tablets did you add?

Set up is 9 months old (post 2.75 month cycling)

Tablets are ROOT TABS (API) and i added one per 15 inch^2 (about half the recommended)

Only other change was last week i added a aquaclear 30 to the system... key word is added though the aqueon 120 is still in place with media from before. and the aquaclear media is starting to color up a bit now... other than that like i said, no real changed recently (as in the last 5-8 days) I am a little lost as to what could b going on...

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When you pay that cash or swipe that card you are making a bond with that animal that you will treat it with love and respect, and its needs will be met, first and foremost (unless you have kids...) I don't care if you have to eat ramen noodles or nothing at all to feed your cat dog fish rat whatever. That's the bond you made! Life is precious!

Root tabs may cause your nitrates to go up, but should not affect nitrite at all. Had to have been an ammonia spike.

Could be, any specific side effects from using ammonia removing media inserts? (they are new to me but came in the kit so i figured yeah why not!) I typically only filter with mechanical and a carbon insert.

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When you pay that cash or swipe that card you are making a bond with that animal that you will treat it with love and respect, and its needs will be met, first and foremost (unless you have kids...) I don't care if you have to eat ramen noodles or nothing at all to feed your cat dog fish rat whatever. That's the bond you made! Life is precious!

Nitrite levels are only tempoary in a fully cycled tank. Root tablets would contain only Nitrates. Make sure you are doing your test correctly. In any live tank, it is not possible to have high Nitrites and no Ammonia or Nitrates. Ammonia is always cycling into Nitrites and then into Nitrates.

In my aquaclear I have an ammonia removing media. Could that be the cause of the nitrites without (and there was a slight color change but hardly noticeable) an abundance of ammonia?

__________________
When you pay that cash or swipe that card you are making a bond with that animal that you will treat it with love and respect, and its needs will be met, first and foremost (unless you have kids...) I don't care if you have to eat ramen noodles or nothing at all to feed your cat dog fish rat whatever. That's the bond you made! Life is precious!

Also I plan to switch out to RO water from our lfs. I am thinking a 10% change every 3 days for two weeks. The ph is only .4 difference and the gh kh is considerably lower. The water is. $.25 a gallon so its real cheap compared to tap splitting with distilled. Any one think that ratio is going to be too quick?

****Side note its nice to have other aquarists to consult with instead of picking a ratio and praying that I don't loose any little ones!****

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When you pay that cash or swipe that card you are making a bond with that animal that you will treat it with love and respect, and its needs will be met, first and foremost (unless you have kids...) I don't care if you have to eat ramen noodles or nothing at all to feed your cat dog fish rat whatever. That's the bond you made! Life is precious!

Mini cycle!

Ammonia finally showed up tonight still under .25 PPM but there now. So I am guessing mini cycle. another 10% change tomorrow it is then!

(side note Nitrites are high nitrates are WNL so all is well in general, treated with some stresszyne and added a touch of niteout )

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When you pay that cash or swipe that card you are making a bond with that animal that you will treat it with love and respect, and its needs will be met, first and foremost (unless you have kids...) I don't care if you have to eat ramen noodles or nothing at all to feed your cat dog fish rat whatever. That's the bond you made! Life is precious!

How high is the nitrite level in ppm? Ammonia registering 0.25ppm isn't a big deal, in fact I've read some folks reporting this as a false positive. You should have 0ppm nitrite in a cycled aquarium, otherwise you might be risking damage to your stock. So, I wouldn't say that things are well until nitrites are at 0. Also, please don't do anything to disrupt the aquarium right now like using RO/distilled water. Keep everything the same and just do enough water changes to keep nitrites at or below 1ppm if you have fish in there. This thread would make a lot more sense if we've got nitrates and nitrites mixed up :-)

Its hard to tell with the test strips i use for daily testing, but the nitrates are around 40-60 PPM (WNL in my book) Nitrites float between 5 (typically right before a PWC) and none.

The tank is (was) established, however i added an aquaclear 30 filter with an ammonia insert, which might have caused the oddities in the water. (added as in along side the established aqeon 20) I am not 100% sure. The fishies are in a 10gal holding tank getting a 10% water change a day (its a pretty small tank for 16 fish and a couple shrimp)

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When you pay that cash or swipe that card you are making a bond with that animal that you will treat it with love and respect, and its needs will be met, first and foremost (unless you have kids...) I don't care if you have to eat ramen noodles or nothing at all to feed your cat dog fish rat whatever. That's the bond you made! Life is precious!

A mini-cycle should only last a day or two at the most. If the readings persist, then something in the tank is giving off ammonia.

Hi ZachZaf, I also had sudden spike in Nitrites this past weekend:

Sat 1/28 Nitrites 0.5, Nitrates 0.0, Ammonia 0.5
Mon 1/30 Nitrites 5.0 +, Nitrates 20.0, Ammonia 0.25
Mon 1/30th, used test strips and got nitrites 5.0 and nitrates 80.0
This was using API master test kit on 1st set of readings (chart only goes to 5.0 on nitrites)

FW aquarium (26gal) was set up 12/26/11...currently no fish in tank, but there was 2 fantail goldfish, 2 black moors, 1 unknown type goldfish. Lost one black moor and the unknown to ?? Had recently added the bl moors and unknown, but think they had ich and ammonia poisoning (?) from LFS. Moved remaining 3 to qt to treat for ich; 2 fantails didn't show any ich, but bl moor did, so I treated all 3. (treated 26g with quick cure, salt and heat, no carbon & qt w/ quick cure, salt, no carbon).

I realize that the tank was probably not fully cycled, but sharp spike in nitrites and nitrates caught me off guard, especially with near 0 ammonia levels. Ammonia had been 1.0-2.0 (used wc to lower) when all fish were in the 26g. I'm wondering if the use of heat and salt altered everything and/or removing carbon caused spikes .

I planned to move all back to 26g, but need to get parameters under control first. Poor little guys have had enough shock for awhile!
Any thoughts on this guys would be appreciative. I'm new to this, so still learning a lot!

lonedove55, your tank is still cycling and is in the nitrite spike stage. That's to be expected. ZachZaf's situation is different because his tank has been up for 9 months, so cycling should've completed a long time ago. In your case, since you don't have fish, it's not that bad, but if you want to reintroduce the fish, you should do large water changes to bring the nitrites down to 1ppm or less. That'll also reduce your nitrates (80ppm is also pretty high for nitrates). Good luck and be patient. This phase took my tank a few weeks to get over. I used Tetra SafeStart and I believe it helped complete the cycle.

Thanks, I figured as much. I might try the SafeStart...couldn't hurt. Will do a water change tomorrow, then wait and see.

My guess is that you will probably need to do 50% water changes about twice a week with that kind of fish load in that small of a tank. This is once the cycle is completed. Cycling doesn't sound like fun either. You should try to re-home 3 of those gf or take them back. 5 in a 26g tank will have it at a persistant state of ammonia of about 1ppm - if I had to guess.

Fish can fight off ich in most cases. It is only when the fish gets stressed that it succombs to the parasites that surround it everyday. Ich is present in most tanks from what I have read. The environment your fish will be in with that small of tank will be contant stress and may be the reason your fish got ich to begin with. Just something to think about.