I think I killed all my beneficial bacteria 😡😔

[IMAGNDAT]

So I restarted my 75gal tank after over 2years hiatus. Threw a raw frozen shrimp to start my cycle, bought the fritz turbostart 900, and dumped it in, after a week or more tested my ammonia it was 0, nirtrite 0, nitrates were high, so I dumb and informed by some other hobbyist that my old expired NO3-PO4-X from red sea should still be good, dumped a few mil in, next day I check my nirtrite and they skyrocket back up , and few days later check my ammonia and its starting to climb back up , any body ever experience this? I think it's the expired red sea solution but can it be something else?

 

[Sk8r]

Well, just wait it out. But stop adding things. Sooner or later it should even out. May take extra time. But Adding Things, while a big tempation to try to hurry things along, at any level, is generally a risk. You cannot hurry bacteria 'sex'. It happens on a 'when it can' timescale. And that is exactly what you're waiting for: the point at which your bacteria have populated enough to handle the waste load.

 

[Uncle99]

I doubt Nopox had anything to do with your unexpected results.
The Nopox carbon dose feeds the bacteria to increase the population but this takes weeks or months to see any change, a few mls in a 75g would change nothing.

Sounds just like a newly started unstable tank, up and down and all around.

Give it a few weeks at least, if not a month or so.

 

[Posseidon]

Were you still adding the raw frozen shrimp after your ammonia and nitrite levels read 0? If not, your nitrifying bacteria may have been dead without their food source. Make sure you're still adding very small quantities of food while bringing the nitrates down.


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[IMAGNDAT]

Were you still adding the raw frozen shrimp after your ammonia and nitrite levels read 0? If not, your nitrifying bacteria may have been dead without their food source. Make sure you're still adding very small quantities of food while bringing the nitrates down.


yea the raw shrimp just disintegrated, guess that might have been it. I added another raw shrimp to restart it, it's been a week and ammonia and nitrites are back to zero, now at the detritus stage.

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[Sk8r]

My method of starting a tank just involves dropping a few flakes of fishfood in every day. If you note it's broken down and gone, it's likely cycling, and when keep dropping it in and get no ammonia over several days but the fishfood disappears, it's cycled.