HELP with amonia spike

[Fishie Nut]

My tank finished cycling about a week ago. On Tuesday my water params were 1.025, NO2 0, NO3 7, NH3 0, Ca 400, pH 8.2, Alk 2.5.

Today all the parameters are the same, lower nitrates to 5, BUT the amonia spiked to 1.0.

What's going on? I'm making water for a 20 gallon water change tomorrow. Is this normal. Amonia is awfully high.

Please help..:(

[bertoni]

People do report this kind of secondary spike. I suspect that one likely cause is that a large animal in the live rock has died and is decaying. That's why I say that waiting for three weeks of zero ammonia improves your odds of avoiding trouble.

Some water changes should be fine.

[Fishie Nut]

Thanks, Jonathan

[dermer]

this is normal and many things will cause this from waste to death and so on i use carbon filtration to control this problem

[Fishie Nut]

I'm using carbon at the intake of my return pump in the sump.
Still got the spike. I'll check it again tomorrow, before I do the water change.

[bertoni]

Carbon isn't going to do much for ammonia spikes. It's really for binding small levels of various organics.

[Fishie Nut]

I just did TWO tests with a different tesk kit and chemicals. The NH3 came out ZERO!!!
Must have been an errant test or bad chems. Boy, did I lose sleep over that one.

Thanks for the help.

[bertoni]

:) Gotta love those measurement errors!