Big chemical problem in tank any advice?

Please dont drill me i'm new at this...





i'm having big trouble with my tank, my ammonia level is at 8, my nitrite is at .25 my nitrate is between 5 and 10 my ph is 7.2 I took out my carbon and put in ammonia remover and i use Cycle. What am i doing wrong? These levels keep rising. My tank is new its' 46 gallons 4 fish in there, 2 gourami's a catfish and a rainbowfish, none of which have symptoms of ammonia posioning. my one gourmai did have hole in the head and ich which are now both gone i did a 1/4 tank change last saturday the medicine stopped lastsaturday. I just dont know what to do about my levels. They just dont seem to begetting any better. IS API testing kits good? should i get strips? Which is more accurate, thanks for the help.Big chemical problem in tank any advice?
OK.. your filter is not cycled, or else the medications you put in have killed the bacteria. Either way you have to get the nitrogen cycle in the filter working.





Only real way to do that is time.





In the short term, do LOTS of partial water changes to control the ammonia level. Remember a 25% change will only drop the ammonia level from 8 to 6, a couple of days and it's back to 8 again. So you need to do water changes every day to get the level down.





Dont touch the fitler, only rinse it out if it gets clogged up, dont change any media. After a couple of weeks it will start working properly and process the ammonia and nitrite for you.





IanBig chemical problem in tank any advice?
Your problem is you didn't let your tank cycle. I suggest reading up on cycling to understand the nitrogen cycle.


Do a 50% water change now and everyday, that should help with keeping the ammonia low until the beneficial bacteria can take care of it.


Your fish will suffer big time because they may not show ammonia poisoning now but eventually they will.


Try to either take back most of the fish and keep 1 or 2 to cycle the tank with or try to take them all back and do a fishless cycle.


strips are useless a freshwater master kit is all you need
Your tank is still cycling. Quit putting cyle in it and put the carbon back in. It's the natural way of a tank. You just have to live through it now since you already put fish in the tank.





Google nitrogen cycle and read up on it.





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Strips are notoriously inaccurate, the API liquid tests are very, very good.





Cycle doesn't do much. If you can try to seed the tank with filter media or gravel from a well established tank. Your tank already has some of this beneficial bacteria, but you can always use more.





I wonder what water conditioner you're using. If you're using Prime, you can have false positive ammonia tests.





Also test your source water. This time of year, because of melting and rain you can get more ammonia in water from turbidity.





Do a big water change right now, 20 - 30 percent, and then do 10% water changes every twelve hours.