I have a slight ammonia spike

[Ajilon]

by slight, I mean it's registering in at 0.3 with a Hagan test. This is occurring in my 12g nano. the nitrates are also slightly elevated.

Should I do a 50% water change or is that too much?
How long should I wait before I retest?
Is this a good opportunity to clean the sand bed or will that make things worse?

[taillonjohn]

the answer depends on if it is a new tank, or an established tank. so, how old is your tank?

normally we don't clean our sand beds so not sure what kind of answer you are looking for.

[Ajilon]

very established tank of at least 2 years.

[qfrisco]

Did you add some new livestock or LR? That's strange for it to spike like that. If you haven't done anything to increase the bioload, I'd bet it's an erroneous test.

You say the nitrates are slightly elevated, but that's not necessarily bad. Did you test nitrites? If the nitrites read above zero, then you probably do have an ammonia spike. A 30% water change would be good, and some amquel. But as I said before, for an established tank like that, if you didn't change the bioload, the test is probably inaccurate.

[Ajilon]

There's a few things that happened over the past week. I added 2 corals to the tank a few days ago. One of them being a sun coral, that we've been having problems getting to eat. Needless to say, I fed it an entire cube of mysis.

This morning, I woke up and heard a sizzling sound. I immediately checked for stray voltage and sure enough, a heater blew up on me and was tossing 110v into the tank. One of the corals died and a few crabs are dead. The fish and sun coral seem to be ok though.

I did a water change yesterday because it smelled rancid, no doubt from the uneaten mysis. It immediately smelled better afterwards. Would another water change today hurt anything? I'd rather err on the side of caution here than anything.

The Nitrites are reading 0. However the calcium, alk and mag are a little low. Phosphates are 1.0 and Ph is 8.0

[cczarnik]

You need to test for copper. I had a heater blow up once, what the electricity didn't get the copper did. Especially inverts. The copper was bad enough that I had to toss rock and sand and start over.

Chuck