sillyaxolotls : I think this’ll be too long for a message so I’m sending it this way rather than spamming your inbox with 100 messages -
I checked Abe’s water this morning and I still had an ammonia level of .50 or .25 (it was .25 after a half hour of sitting out but I could have sworn it was .50 5 minutes after I did the test, which is when the result would have been accurate).
I’m going away for a few days so I wanted to change the water so that it didn’t go past .50.
Typically during water changes I change 10 gallons once a week and for 6-8 days I’ll get 0ammonia, 0nitrite, 10-20nitrate and then do a change on the 7th/8th day.
So today because it looked like I had .50 ammonia I wanted to change it so that I can check the levels tomorrow, and then again on Saturday before I leave for 2 days. In case it didn’t work and I need to do something, rather than waiting and being sorry in the end that I couldn’t change the water before I left.
Anyway - I took out 10gallons of water, my new water, prime-d up was waiting. I typically let the new water sit for 5minutes to let the Prime kick in because I’m paranoid.
I empty 10 gallons, and I go to add the new water.
The water was 20.1C before removing/adding any water. Typically the chiller clicks on at 19.9C and clicks off at 18.1C but when I woke up it was already at 19.9 so I wanted to turn the chiller off before it clicked on. By the time I was set up it had risen to 20.1C on it’s own. I add 5gallons of water - the temp rose to 20.8C. It made me nervous so I grabbed a bucket of dirty water and added about 2gallons of that, which brought it back down to 20.6. I mixed some old and new water together and added the other 3gallons and it stayed at 20.6/20.7C.
When I add water it’s right next to the thermometer, rather than on the other side of the tank. I know that if I let the water mix together I would get a lower temp (once I added 3gallons and waited a couple moments and the temp evened out - like adding water made it 20.1 but after waiting a moment it went down to 19.9 again - which makes sense seeing as how the water needs to mix together). Anyway - In the end it was at 20.6/7 when I finished - from a starting temp of 20.1. Only about 3gallons of replacement water was actually old water. Making only 7gallons new water, instead of the usual 10.
I turned the filter back on, and the chiller and the chiller clicked on immediately. It is now going to lower the temp back down to 18.1 over a couple hours. It’s a bit hot in my house today so it may take a little longer (I noticed that the temp of the house does effect cooling rate, I assume because the chiller can only work so fast and the heating rate of the water is competing with it), but I think that’s okay - the longer it takes the less of a swing it is, and the less stressful.
Abe’s fine, he came out of his hiding spot to look at me and ask me why I felt the need to do such an annoying thing to his house at 10 in the morning when he’s trying to take a nap after a long night of playing.
I’m just worried about the bacteria in the filter, really. I’m worried that maybe this water change will have made things worse rather than better? I know I can’t check again for 24 hours if I want an accurate reading of the levels but I’m like, dying to check them right now which would be useless. I’m just worried about shocking the bacteria with temp swings, even though it’s used to going from 18.1 to 19.9 and back, what if it’s not used to going from 20.6 to 18.1 even if it does take several hours to get there? What if by trying to take out the ammonia with a partial water change today I killed off the bacteria completely? Or destroyed the nitrate or dropped it to such a low number that it can’t keep up with the ammonia? Do you think it’ll be okay or is it too hard to tell?
Why is the nitrogen cycle so complicated for me? I’ll have a couple months of smooth sailing and then STORM! It’s like it’s trying to keep me on my toes or something. :(
