Couple of questions...

[adampetherick]

I've just done a 5% water change on my tank which has been running for 2 weeks now, it was cycled with pure ammoniathen a 90% water change before adding fish, with my 3 clowns, 12 tiger barbs and 9 Rasbora's it's reading 0 Ammonia, 0 Nitrites and 5 nitrates, which is great but the nitrate figure sounds too good to be true on a tank this new?

Also, the clowns that have been in since friday spend the whole time hiding except very late at night when the tank lights are off, do they become more sociable after time or if they had a bigger shoal?

Thanks
Adam

[LES..]

Hi Adam,

Are you using tap water or RO water?
For a low Nitrate reading of 5ppm I will assume you are using RO water, Helen recently posted a thread on the accuracy of nitrate testing with RO water, I doubt this is related to your reading though. If you go back over the cycling process information you will find that nitrate is the end product and will only ever increase over time, as fish keepers we perform water changes to remove the nitrate from the aquarium.

Going on your post history you added fish to this tank up on the 5th of September making this the first water change after about a week. With this information (assuming 0 nitrate at the start of the week when you added the fish) you can use the PFK Water change calculator to work out how much water you need to be changing.

If it's tap water i'll be moving to Fleet reall soon now ;-)

[adampetherick]

It's with tap water, except from 1 x 20l barrel I got from my lfs, I wanted 2 barrels to keep the tap water in for a few days before doing water changes (thought I'd get 1 RO one with minerals for about £2 more than an empty barrel) so I could add tapsafe and let the temp come up a bit but apart from that it's all tap water

oh and the tank was cycled fishless with pure ammonia from Homebase

[LES..]

Hi Adam,

Wow, the difference that 16 miles makes... Our tap water in Guildford sits at around 40ppm for nitrate :( . A good test to see if your nitrate reading from the tank is valid is to test the tap water and compare the results. In a tank with a well established cycle your nitrate level should be a bit higher than the tap water. Well it probably will be provided you don't have a seriously planted tank.
I'd love to see our tank's nitrate level get down to 5ppm.

As a brief aside, which fish shop do you go to around here?

[adampetherick]

As a brief aside, which fish shop do you go to around here?

Tank = Notcotts Garden Centre, Bagshot
fx5 = Maidenhead Aquatics, Ascot
6 Tiger barbs = Maidenhead Aquatics, Ascot
6 Tiger barbs and 12 rasbora's from Badshot lea
Think the clowns came from Maidenhead aquatics in Woking
Plants from M.A in Ascot and Notcutts