View Full Version : I think I added too much ammonia
One fish
03/08/2015, 01:42 AM
Hellooooo. I am starting a tank and trying to cycle it. How bad is it if I added too much ammonia. No nitrate or nitrite. Just off the charts ammonia reading. Do I need to start over? I guess I just needed two drops? But I may have put like 10 drops on accident. Thanks!
pyithar
03/08/2015, 04:11 AM
it's fine(i'm assuming you don't have any livestock in the tank).you'll eventually get nitrites and nitrates. just be patient. good luck.
kmbyrnes
03/08/2015, 05:46 AM
No worries. If you have live rock, the bacteria will eventually break it down into nitrites and nitrates.
All you need to do is wait.
Congrats on getting your cycle started.
wolfblue
03/08/2015, 06:22 AM
You could wait it out but high ammonia is actually bad for the bacteria that eat ammonia. It could add weeks to your cycle time. If it was me I might, take 10ml of tank water and mix it with 30ml of new salt water and then test that for ammonia. If that test read 4ppm the tank water would be more like 16ppm, do you follow? You only really need 1-2ppm but up to about 5-6ppm should not slow things down. In this example I would do a 80% water change to get back to about 3.2 ppm. But you can still just wait it out if you don't want to waste the water.
FortuneFavours
03/08/2015, 03:07 PM
I miscalculated and added too much ammonia when I started too; only measurable downside was a high nitrate count after the cycling was done. I wouldn't worry about it if the tank doesn't have any livestock.
Goldndoodle
03/08/2015, 05:09 PM
I did a lot of research on fishless cycling when I recently cycled my new setup. From what I remember - and just going off of memory here at this point - anything over 5ppm is bad.
When you say "off the charts" - what is the max on your test kit?
How big is your setup? And how big were these drops? I was using the ACE Pure Ammonia when I did my cycle, and I had to add 250 drops to a 120G tank to get from 0.5PPM back up to 2PPM when I was testing. I used around 300 drops to get up to 2PPM with the initial ammonia dose.
When I was cycling I used two sources for testing - a Red Sea Reef Master Test kit (ammonia only goes to 2ppm) and Tetra quick strips (ammonia goes up to 6ppm). Whenever I would test at 2ppm on the Red Sea, I would confirm with the Tetra strips to see what they were reading (I actually never saw anything on the Tetras over 2pmm, when the Red Sea maxed out at 2ppm. And BTW - the Tetra Quick Strips were surprisingly consistent with the Red Sea results on every test.)
If you're up over 5ppm, I would consider a water change to bring it under 5ppm at least.
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