High ammonia

[Rainbowlightning]

As you may have read in my other threads, I'm having a serious issue with the ammonia in my Betta's hospital tank.

I clean his water out and by the next day I get at least a .5 ammonia reading.

Details:
-I use 50% tap water (which appears to have a very low reading of ammonia) and 50% spring water (which has a slightly high PH).
-I use ACE (for the ammonia) and stress coat.
-I remove all uneaten food and any other visible particles I find in his water.

I AM going to buy Prime this weekend... see if that helps.

But until then, has anybody possibly got any suggestions to what I can do as to not make him go through ammonia poisoning?

[marcusbacus]

How can we not get paranoid with these results?

By rereading the topic about ammonia tests, I found that my test is (or should be) really the kind that measures the toxic ammonia (all the characteristics match), but its box says it measures NH3 and NH4... and other day I did a test before doing a full change in a 4,5L tank (uncycled, unfiltered) and it gave me way higher levels than I could expect (about 1.0 or maybe higher, can't remember now) but there was no apparent sign of any intoxication (which should have happened, considering the high levels), so I'm guessing that at least half of that result wasn't exactly toxic ammonia or else the poor fish would have been dead by then. My water doesn't have chloramine (0 ammonia when fresh from the tap).

Since that testing, I've added plants to that tank but I didn't measure the ammonia yet (I have one day until a full change again).

[amanichen]

This may be of use:

healthybetta.proboards19.com/index.cgi?board=waterconditioning&action=display&thread=1098338024

[marcusbacus]

That's the topic I re-read before posting mine... I was told that the Hagen ammonia test (which measures full ammonia, 1 reagent) has a table that can let you estimate the toxic ammonia in conjunction with pH values.

PS. a google research on NH3 with temperature and pH gave me this result, which has this table I guess:

fins.actwin.com/aquatic-plants/month.9507/msg00139.html

and also a NH3 javascript calculator! :

bridge.ecn.purdue.edu/~piwc/w3-research/free-ammonia/nh3.html

but is the 0.25, 0.75 etc. results the same units as shown in the calculator (mg/L) or they are ppm - or both are the same? If so it seems that my toxic ammonia rates are quite low considering these calculations (although halfway to the toxic levels for 4 days of exposure according to the 2nd table found in the first link) but the test result is much more alarming.

[Rainbowlightning]

How very interesting.
A good thing to know is 1ppm=1mg/L

So IF these calculations are correct... that's great, it would mean I only had a 0.1 ammonia.

Which would also mean that my test kit can't be an ST, because it must be calculating the total ammonia. Although I had read that after somebody tested it, it theoreticly calculated only the toxic ammonia.
What I've done, is emailed Aquarium Pharmaceuticals, and asked what type of ammonia it tests... hopefully they will reply.

OOps, I had used the calculater wrong, I had entered the temp in F... so by converting to Celsius, the new result is 0.007
Which is waaaay better!

[marcusbacus]

Just did a check, and mine is 0.00174 after a week without a change! Seems that the plants (Elodea) I've added 10 days ago or something are even better for that than I was expecting.

[amanichen]

You also have to remember to look at your water conditioner and see what it does to ammonia. This is especially true if you're using something like Amquel those charts are useless.

[abm]

amanichen said:

You also have to remember to look at your water conditioner and see what it does to ammonia. This is especially true if you're using something like Amquel those charts are useless.

Which is why I now test my water out of the tap and out of the aged water container before adding conditioners

[Rainbowlightning]

I'm fighting a loosing battle.... I started off here with high ammonia, and now my ammonia has leveled out but at the same time my PH, alkalinity and hardness have dropped drasticly. And I've not done anything to the tank for almost 2 days (apart from a 10% water change last night).
This is just so unreal... so to my next topic:
How long have people had to wait for their tanks to cycle/ how many gallons?
I'm making a post.