Quarantine tank questions

[DaveDe]

My tank appears to be done cycling but I'm giving it another week. In the mean time I'm setting up my quarantine tank and I put everything in yesterday including the RO salt water. The water appeared very cloudy and it settled overnight with lots of powdery white stuff on the bottom of my 10 gal. Q tank. Just to make sure that's normal (because I am a newbie) I called them up and they said it was just the buffering agent - no biggie. At the same time I tested the water today and everything was fine except the ammonia was up around .25 Why? Where i got the RO water from didn't seem to have an answer - he made it sound like a little was ok. I don't think that's the case. A friend of mine said just add amquel (spelling?) to it before adding a fish to the Q tank and that should get rid of the ammonia.

 

What do you think?

[seabass]

At the same time I tested the water today and everything was fine except the ammonia was up around .25 Why?

It's not that uncommon for salt mixes to contain ammonia (from contaminated calcium chloride and magnesium chloride). Normally, a tank's biological filter can deal with the small amount of ammonia introduced during a typical water change.

 

A friend of mine said just add amquel (spelling?) to it before adding a fish to the Q tank and that should get rid of the ammonia. What do you think?

It's best to have a biological filter that can process the ammonia. This can be a bio-wheel, sponge, or even a transferred media bag with carbon that's several weeks old.