Help With Readings

You need to have zero ammonia and zero nitrite for 7 days in a row, without doing water changes before getting more fish. This is more important at high pH like yours as a larger proportion of the ammonia is in the toxic form compared to pH below 7.

However.....

What are you using to test ammonia? Your results look like a strip tester except that the all-in-one strips can't have ammonia on them (the colour developing time is different from the rest). The reason I ask is because with liquid ammonia testers, the colour of the water depends on the type of light it is read under and also the way the testing person's eye perceives the colour - some people never see the zero colour. This doesn't apply to strip tests, only liquids.

Nitrate is a bit on the high side - it should really be kept below 20 ppm. However, there may be quite a lot of nitrate in your tap water so you need to test that as well. If your tap water nitrate is above 20 ppm there is little you can do to get it lower, though using lots of live plants could well help.The only other alternative for reducing the nitrate in the water you put into the tank is to prefilter it with nitrate removing media.

Your high GH and KH are consistent with your high pH. KH is not important except where it is very low when it can get used up and allow the pH to crash. With yours being high, you can forget about KH.
GH is very important to fish, and is often referred to as just 'hardness'. Your hardness is pretty hard, so you need to keep fish that like hard water.





Back to ammonia and nitrite - both of these must be zero or the fish will suffer harm. The 0 and 0.25 levels in liquid ammonia testers can be hard to distinguish, but anything over 0.25 is definitely not zero.
You said your pre-water change ammonia and nitrite were 0.5 to 1.0. With reading this high you need to do at least 75% water changes per day. In fact you should test every day and do a water change whenever the reading is above zero.
If you don't have any live plants, I recommend that you get some. These are your best friend while cycling. They will take up ammonia and unlike bacteria they do not convert it into nitrite, they use it to make proteins etc. Getting live plants should reduce both your ammonia and nitrite levels, and with enough plants they'll reduce them to zero.
Water sprite can be planted in the substrate or used as a floating plant, and when used floating is particularly good at removing ammonia. They also need good light and carbon dioxide both of which are plentiful on the water surface.

Thanks Sue, very helpful and detail.

I tested my tap water for nitrates in the past which read below 10 ppm but seeing 50 ppm today after 75% water change - I need to test this again.

I am looking for hard to very hard fish so this should suit my water parameters.

I have two Jave Fern in the tank at the moment. The leaves are slowly growing roots.

I have 4 male guppies at the moment, feeding twice a day. My tank size is 54l, 60x30x30cm.

Before 75% water change today my nitrate readings almost same as now. I mix hot/ cold tap water to bring down to reasonable temperature.

I will add a few water sprite plants. Are there any plants that absorb nitrates? My substrate is gravel and is not plant friendly so I am looking for easy care with minimum light.

Sounds like my tap water has high Nitrates this time. Direct tap water reading is 35 ppm, Nitrites is 0.15. Surprisingly Chlorine is 0.1 ppm.

I use bucket method and treat with Tetra Aqua Safe into the bucket to the volume required for that water quantity.

I did not use any other chemicals so far.

If you took some water in as you bought the fish, the water would have been perfect because there were no fish to make it un-perfect yet.

One thing you could try is a bottle of Seachem Prime and use that as your dechlorinator. It detoxifies both ammonia and nitrite, though they do still show up in the tests in the detoxfied form. The detoxification lasts somewhere between 24 and 48 hours so you still need to do the water changes but at least the fish will be safe between water changes. Use the dose rate on the bottle, don't be tempted to overdose.

If you have nitrate in your tap water, the simplest thing is to just live with it. As long as you get ammonia and nitrite to zero.

How did you get the reading of 2ppm CO2 out of interest?

In addition to adding some more live plants to control Nitrates can I use this Sponge Filter https://www.amazon.co.uk/Juwel-Filter-Sponge-Nitrate-Compact/dp/B000G04LXG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539603995&sr=8-1&keywords=juwel+compact+Nitrate+Removal+Filter+Sponge?

Thanks Sue, I live with adding more plants in for now and see drop in readings before considering Pozzani filter.

I am using liquid test for Ammonia and test strips for the others.

Hi uv,

Would you please confirm which liquid test kit you are using for ammonia? Also, are the Tetra test strips in date? I have never used the test strip/mobile phone approach; there are a few variables that could lead to erroneous readings. Very nervous about the 2ppm CO2 measurement but this is probably the least important reading right now.

JPC