DarknessAlive
New member
laeelin,
Glad to see your ammonia is on the way out.. I went through a really rough time with my nano (a 25 gal) that had the TBS package in it. My ammonia skyrocketed so bad, it was greener than the darkest green on the test kit!! This went on for days... 20%, 40% 75% water changes would help bring it down to about 1 ppm, but it would jolt right back up shortly later. We went through a "screw this tank" period where we just didn't know what the heck to do. We were calling Mark at TBS almost every other day it seemed asking for help... He gave us a good pep talk and we ended up taking out all the rock, and scraping just about every sponge, etc off that smelled even remotely weird. I'm sure we took off more than we even needed to, but at this point we were desperate to get the ammonia under control. During this "scrape off" we found a dead cucumber on the bottom of one of the rocks.. I still wonder to this day if that is what caused our whole problem. It took about 2 weeks for the cycle to complete. We didn't even have a hard cycle with the 2nd half of the package.. I think we did a whole 2 water changes. It's been a few months now, and we just added our first fish, a royal gramma, last week (we waited quite a while to be sure that it would be okay). He's doing great, and the tank looks awesome.
Moral of the story? Keep on going.. it gets better. I just think that it is *very* hard to initially cycle a nano with TBS. With all that life on it, if one little thing dies, you could be in a heap of trouble FAST.
Glad to see your ammonia is on the way out.. I went through a really rough time with my nano (a 25 gal) that had the TBS package in it. My ammonia skyrocketed so bad, it was greener than the darkest green on the test kit!! This went on for days... 20%, 40% 75% water changes would help bring it down to about 1 ppm, but it would jolt right back up shortly later. We went through a "screw this tank" period where we just didn't know what the heck to do. We were calling Mark at TBS almost every other day it seemed asking for help... He gave us a good pep talk and we ended up taking out all the rock, and scraping just about every sponge, etc off that smelled even remotely weird. I'm sure we took off more than we even needed to, but at this point we were desperate to get the ammonia under control. During this "scrape off" we found a dead cucumber on the bottom of one of the rocks.. I still wonder to this day if that is what caused our whole problem. It took about 2 weeks for the cycle to complete. We didn't even have a hard cycle with the 2nd half of the package.. I think we did a whole 2 water changes. It's been a few months now, and we just added our first fish, a royal gramma, last week (we waited quite a while to be sure that it would be okay). He's doing great, and the tank looks awesome.
Moral of the story? Keep on going.. it gets better. I just think that it is *very* hard to initially cycle a nano with TBS. With all that life on it, if one little thing dies, you could be in a heap of trouble FAST.
