Need Help / Prime and Ammonia

[Cheercoach123]

Hey guys.  I started a 20 Long with HoB AC 70 (will be adding an additional one next week and have one as a fuge and one for protein skimmer) 3 weeks ago.   Tunze 6025, heater, and chinese black (actually its blue strangely enough) box led lights.   I have around 30 pounds of dry rock that had been bleached and soaked and dried, plus a half pound live rock from the LFS store.   (On a side note Petco is the best of two options for my LFS.....  I have to drive over an hour for a decent store)

 

I have set up 4 reefs prior to this before moving, 3 of which are still running (biocube cracked :( )

 

I decided to try something new and use biospira and stability to start up the tank.  I used a shrimp as an ammonia source.  

 

Everything seemed to be going fine a week and half ago and I added some zoas and a Duncan, and firefish.  Stupid I know.   I started freaking out when I did it and decided to start dosing prime until I could be sure the tank was cycled, and started a second bottle of Stabilty.   The day before I ordered a CUC which arrived Thursday.  (The mailman ignored the instructions and left it in our parcel locker) 

 

Tragically and looking back not surprisingly I lost the firefish.   I dont believe it was ammonia but I made the most rookie mistake ever and after drip acclimating him, noticed a the next day the tank was low and topped it off with fresh rodi.  After using about of gallon in acclimating.  Salinity dropped and I panicked instead of reading I decided to fix it right there and raised the salinity intank by manually adding salt.  I should've let evap take it up slowly then top off with fresh salt mix, but I didn't.   I later found the firefish stuck to the Tunze 6025 I have in there.  

 

Now its possible he died from the powerhead or from me being stupid, or from ammonia, but I dosed a full cap of prime to be sure.  

 

Now I am stuck in a cycle of being unable to accurately test for ammonia because what is there is bound in the prime.  It reads exteemely high with API.  But I'm also afraid to stop dosing prime and kill my corals and clean up crew.  

 

I have some diatom bloom, hair algae is growing fast (I believe I need new filters for the rodi) but everything in the tank appears to be thriving.  I currently have a favia,Duncan, zoas and galaxia that are doing great, and my snails and emerald crab are going to town on the algae.  

 

When should I stop dosing prime? When will it be safe to do so and when/how can I accurately test for ammonia?  I do have nitrates. As a precaution I did a 10 gallon water change Friday night and plan on another midweek.   I don't want to be dosing prime just to be safe for the next few months if I can avoid it. 

[Clown79]

Ammonia will still register when testing, Prime just detoxifies it to make it none toxic to fish.

 

In my experience, corals have lived through cycles where as fish won't.

 

It will be safe to stop dosing prime when the cycle is complete

[seabass]

to Nano-Reef.com.

 

19 hours ago, Cheercoach123 said:

I used a shrimp as an ammonia source.

In addition to ammonia, that adds a bunch of organics and phosphate.

 

19 hours ago, Cheercoach123 said:

Everything seemed to be going fine a week and half ago and I added some zoas and a Duncan, and firefish.

 

The firefish would have been fine with low salinity; however, your inverts might have been stressed by it.

 

19 hours ago, Cheercoach123 said:

Now its possible he died from the powerhead or from me being stupid, or from ammonia, but I dosed a full cap of prime to be sure.

The powerhead wouldn't have killed a healthy fish.

 

For Prime, you should be dosing 2ml every 24 hours.  Clown is right in that most ammonia tests will still register ammonia (that's because it's temporarily converted to ammonium, which is less toxic).  And after a day or two, the ammonium will convert back to ammonia.  However, the biofilter can still process the ammonium.  Also, keep in mind that repeated use of Prime can affect ammonia tests too.

 

I would continue to dose Prime as ammonia is harmful to just about everything.  But obviously, some things are more sensitive than others.  You can change out all of the water to export the nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, ammonium, and Prime.  However, any remaining organics will still break down; so you will have to continue to dose Prime until your biofilter can keep up.

 

But if you can have your LFS hold your livestock for you while your tank cycles, that'd be best.

 

19 hours ago, Cheercoach123 said:

but everything in the tank appears to be thriving

Well, still alive anyway.

[Cheercoach123]

Thank you for the responses.   Definitely the biggest issue I'm seeing is prime messing with ammonia test.  Before I had added the fish ammonia had dropped from 2 ppm to none.  Nitrates were between 5 to 10 PPM.  I never saw nitrites but I've never once actually seen nitrites when testing, ever.  And this is my fifth.  

 

In about a week and a half my tank will have been running wet for right at a month.  Should I continue to dose prime, do as big a water change as possible, and then run a lot of ammonia tests and keep prime on standby if needed?   I just want to know how to safely stop using prime, but definitively know that all ammonia is being processed and not nuking my tank.    I know that the tank has processed ammonia and I have continued with Stability and am considering another bottle of biospira or dr Tim's to be safe when the time comes to try to stop dosing prime.  

 

LFS holding the livestock isn't a great option, because the local Petco (which isn't one of the better Petcos I've seen either) is a better choice than my LFS honestly.  

 

So far everything except the firefish is still going great.  Zoas are looking better than when I got them, the Duncans colored up really nicely and has eaten a few mysis.   The emerald crab and all my snails are extremely active.  

[Cheercoach123]

And on the Salinity, honestly I really think I might have killed the firefish by raising the salinity back up immediately instead of taking the time to raise it alowly.  After researching more it seems going from high to low quickly is generally not fatal but the opposite isn't.  Would that be correct?  

[seabass]

38 minutes ago, Cheercoach123 said:

Should I continue to dose prime, do as big a water change as possible, and then run a lot of ammonia tests and keep prime on standby if needed?

Sounds like a plan.

 

36 minutes ago, Cheercoach123 said:

After researching more it seems going from high to low quickly is generally not fatal but the opposite isn't.  Would that be correct?

For most fish, yes.

[DSFIRSTSLTWATER]

Is a .002 swing in either direction bad? Or is that considered within normal operation? Just kinda wondered about that.

[Clown79]

18 minutes ago, DSFIRSTSLTWATER said:

Is a .002 swing in either direction bad? Or is that considered within normal operation? Just kinda wondered about that.

I'd say normal. Going from 1.025 to 1.026 during evap is normal.

 

An issue is raising your salinity from 1.023 to 1.026, that's a significant increase.

 

Like alk and temp it dropping or rising a bit is normal. 

 

Its large increases and drops that have significant effects

[seabass]

20 minutes ago, DSFIRSTSLTWATER said:

Is a .002 swing in either direction bad? Or is that considered within normal operation? Just kinda wondered about that.

You mean in specific gravity.  It's a little unusual for evaporation to swing specific gravity more than 0.001.  And when treating with hyposalinity, you shouldn't raise specific gravity more than 0.002 each day.

 

Edit: oops, Clown beat me again.

[DSFIRSTSLTWATER]

2 minutes ago, seabass said:

You mean in specific gravity.  It's a little unusual for evaporation to swing specific gravity more than 0.001.  And when treating with hyposalinity, you shouldn't raise specific gravity more than 0.002 each day.

 

Edit: oops, Clown beat me again.

lol shes on top of it. I was just sorta wondering while we were talking about salinity. Mine only varies .001 and that's right before my ato kicks on. It's never gone higher than .001. It was kinda just food for thought :-)

[DSFIRSTSLTWATER]

Early on I thought any little bit of evap would change the salinity and now that i've been doing this for 5 months and testing salinity I realized it has to evaporate quite a bit to see it actually move.

[Clown79]

2 hours ago, DSFIRSTSLTWATER said:

Early on I thought any little bit of evap would change the salinity and now that i've been doing this for 5 months and testing salinity I realized it has to evaporate quite a bit to see it actually move.

I've topped up my tanks 1 time a day manually and never had an issue with that. I'm certain salinity changes somewhat but not drastically.

 

 

[banasophia]

Oh no, how stressful, I’m sorry that happened to your fish. 😞 It sounds like you were so worried that you panicked and added the dry salt directly to the tank to correct the problem, and you mentioned it was a gallon you had added of the plain RODI, so I’m guessing you added 1/2 cup of dry salt directly to the tank? If so I’m thinking that’s probably what harmed the fish. You always want to mix the salt into the RODI water before you add it to the tank. 

[DSFIRSTSLTWATER]

3 hours ago, Clown79 said:

I've topped up my tanks 1 time a day manually and never had an issue with that. I'm certain salinity changes somewhat but not drastically.

 

 

I was doing that for a while. I wanted to have a solid ATO so when my wife and I go on vacation I won't have to worry about topping off. That and I was scared about the swing..once I realized it doesn't move much I was really relieved.

[Jesterrace]

Just me, but Prime is a "last resort" sort of thing.  If you have an ammonia spike then you use it, but trying to short cut the cycle with chemicals often ends in failure.  As has been said many times, nothing good happens fast in a saltwater tank. 

[banasophia]

On 8/20/2018 at 12:57 PM, Cheercoach123 said:

And on the Salinity, honestly I really think I might have killed the firefish by raising the salinity back up immediately instead of taking the time to raise it alowly.  After researching more it seems going from high to low quickly is generally not fatal but the opposite isn't.  Would that be correct?  

So I think that if you tried to restore the salinity level by sprinkling dry salt directly into the tank, that may explain why the fish died. 

 

As as far as what to do now, I would add BioSpira (or Nutri-Seawater) right away (Stability did not work for me)... this will increase the beneficial bacteria in your water column that will be able to colonize your rock and break down the ammonia/Prime and nitrite/Prime faster. I would also add a sack of matrix media if you have a place to put it, as this would provide additional porous surface area for the beneficial bacteria to colonize. 

 

I will qualify my recommendations by saying I’m new to the hobby, but I’ve cycled 2 saltwater and 1 freshwater tank in the past 9 months. My daughter’s freshwater tank appeared to be fully cycled back in January but when we added additional fish, the biofilter could not handle the bioload, ammonia went up, and we scrambled to stabilize the tank and strengthen the biofilter... thankfully we were successful and we did not lose any fish, but we also faced the issue with Prime making it so the ammonia badge and her strips did not work for a while, so I understand that challenge. 

[seabass]

IIRC, the Seachem Ammonia Alert badge doesn't test for total ammonia.  So the ammonium (temporarily converted from ammonia by Prime) wouldn't register until it's converted back to free ammonia (in 24 to 48 hours).

[banasophia]

8 hours ago, seabass said:

IIRC, the Seachem Ammonia Alert badge doesn't test for total ammonia.  So the ammonium (temporarily converted from ammonia by Prime) wouldn't register until it's converted back to free ammonia (in 24 to 48 hours).

Well that is what it says on the Seachem site, but with my daughter’s freshwater tank the reading seemed to stay high once it spiked and we started using Prime... perhaps we didn’t wait long enough for it to come back down (waited a week maybe, can’t remember for sure). 

 

I just checked the supplies for her tank and it looks like we have both Prime and AmGuard, so maybe it was the AmGuard that caused the issue? I read that it can take a lot longer for the reading to decrease on the badges? We ended up buying a new badge to put in and it read safe when the old one was still reading alarm.

 

It’s possible it was user error of some kind, I was a total newbie at the time, but the fact the old badge was still blue when the new one was was put in and stayed yellow certainly made me think it was an issue with the badge being damaged. 

Edited August 22, 2018 by banasophia
Edit: Would love to hear if anyone has used the badge successfully while treating for an ammonia spike with Prime or AmGuard.

[Clown79]

3 hours ago, banasophia said:

Well that is what it says on the Seachem site, but with my daughter’s freshwater tank the reading seemed to stay high once it spiked and we started using Prime... perhaps we didn’t wait long enough for it to come back down (waited a week maybe, can’t remember for sure). 

 

I just checked the supplies for her tank and it looks like we have both Prime and AmGuard, so maybe it was the AmGuard that caused the issue? I read that it can take a lot longer for the reading to decrease on the badges? We ended up buying a new badge to put in and it read safe when the old one was still reading alarm.

 

It’s possible it was user error of some kind, I was a total newbie at the time, but the fact the old badge was still blue when the new one was was put in and stayed yellow certainly made me think it was an issue with the badge being damaged. 

I found with the badges removing them from tank and letting them go back to normal shows accurate readings after.

 

I had tested mine, washed it and then added it to my established tank. It still showed the same results from testing.

 

I then washed and let it dry out. Once it went back to 0 it accurately read my established tank at 0 (confirmed 0 with ammonia test kit)

 

 

[banasophia]

12 hours ago, Clown79 said:

I found with the badges removing them from tank and letting them go back to normal shows accurate readings after.

 

I had tested mine, washed it and then added it to my established tank. It still showed the same results from testing.

 

I then washed and let it dry out. Once it went back to 0 it accurately read my established tank at 0 (confirmed 0 with ammonia test kit)

 

 

Awesome tip, thank you! Did you just rinse it with RODI?

[Clown79]

5 hours ago, banasophia said:

Awesome tip, thank you! Did you just rinse it with RODI?

Yw.

Ya and then I let it dry and return to 0 before reusing