Shorty wrote:
Hi!


At the beginning of june I noticed that I had a high amount of nitrates
(20ppm) so I decided to change the water. The ammonia was about 1 at
that time. I changed about half of the water.


Personally I wouldn't have worried about 20ppm and would have carried
on doing the usual weekly partial water change, maybe increasing it by
a few percent. The ammonia would have concerned me, but could have
been the start of a mini-cycle after cleaning the filter too much or
adding fish.


The nitrate went down by
about a half but at the end of next day ammonia climbed to 2. So, in a
hurry, I did another water change... and guess what... nitrate down by
50%. to 5ppm...ammonia up to 4!!!!


Are you adding water conditioner to your tap water? Did your ph drop
too low and stall the cycle perhaps?


To keep the water ph from crashing I
added some bicarbonate as a buffer since my tap water KH s zero.


I use coral substrate (1Kg per 40L) to keep it 7.4'ish. When I first
started out, mine crashed to 6.0 and I had exactly the same problem as
you, so I prefer to keep it high and stable now. My three community
tanks have no problems using coral and I would have thought a stable ph
is more important than using bottles of stuff to alter it to suit the
fish.

IMO you are doing too much fiddling with your tank and need to stop and
take a breather to let things settle down, you simply aren't letting
the thing balance by doing huge water changes and adding bicarbs, which
is a temporary fix at best.

If I was you I would *slowly* add some coral substrate in filter bags,
eventually bury it under your normal substrate. Be careful, adding too
much too quickly can have an _instant_ effect on your ph.

With any luck raising the ph will kick-start your cycle like it did
with mine and I haven't had any ph or cycle problems since, it's the
method I use on my 180L, 125L and 500L and all of these have big pieces
of bogwood in for the plecs which is known to lower the ph over time.