Ammonia slowly climbing?

[brandon429]

The fish swimming midwater plus rocks and sand indicate no free ammonia as we hunt testing confounds

water clarity, massive surface area
free ammonia-fish can’t excrete ammonia through gills and they can’t respire there either, they twitch dart and aerotax to the top

top hovering of fish is a classic sign as well as requisite cloudy water. A source of ammonia constant enough to overcome that much surface area will boost water column bacteria and be cloudy as the surface area already didn’t have room for more bacteria, cycled reefs are full on the date the cycle completes.

one new rule that emerged out of the pattern of good seneye tests was that ammonia among that much surface area can’t ever hold or be continually rising, there’s no input source to overtake that much active surface area. Even two dead fish in that much dilution...seneye reports still showed control in the thousandths ppm

if adding straight ammonia was happening in top off water enough to overpower a reef, that source would be liquid cat litter waste smell.


if this aquarium has free ammonia confirmed by another seneye or some sort of trustworthy benchmark I’m going to need counseling as concepts will be blown I’ll have the total recall spaz, break things


a spike of ammonia - absolutely. Even a blast of feed will spike but we simply see steady state thousandths ppm returned very fast in everything but quarantine tanks. Dead tang in tank didn’t spike a seneye out of thousandths ppm on one standout post recently

I’m not sure what chemical could be making seneye read like that, can’t wait to find out. I look for total devastation of the tank within 48 hours if it’s truly unable to control ammonia, and I think a sustained dose of antibiotics is what it would take to myth busters cause it

 

[j.falk]

Ah yes...forgot about the smell...the ammonia would be stinking if the ammonia was high.

 

[PRock]

The fish swimming midwater plus rocks and sand indicate no free ammonia as we hunt testing confounds

water clarity, massive surface area/e t
free ammonia-fish can’t excrete ammonia through gills and they can’t respire there either, they twitch dart and aerotax to the top

top hovering of fish is a classic sign as well as requisite cloudy water. A source of ammonia constant enough to overcome that much surface area will boost water column bacteria and be cloudy as the surface area already didn’t have room for more bacteria, cycled reefs are full on the date the cycle completes.

one new rule that emerged out of the pattern of good seneye tests was that ammonia among that much surface area can’t ever hold or be continually rising, there’s no input source to overtake that much active surface area. Even two dead fish in that much dilution...seneye reports still showed control in the thousandths ppm

if adding straight ammonia was happening in top off water enough to overpower a reef, that source would be liquid cat litter waste smell.


if this aquarium has free ammonia confirmed by another seneye or some sort of trustworthy benchmark I’m going to need counseling as concepts will be blown I’ll have the total recall spaz, break things


a spike of ammonia - absolutely. Even a blast of feed will spike but we simply see steady state thousandths ppm returned very fast in everything but quarantine tanks. Dead tang in tank didn’t spike a seneye out of thousandths ppm on one standout post recently

I’m not sure what chemical could be making seneye read like that, can’t wait to find out. I look for total devastation of the tank within 48 hours if it’s truly unable to control ammonia, and I think a sustained dose of antibiotics is what it would take to myth busters cause it

This makes me feel much better because I don'ee any of the symptoms you mention in the tank. Is it possible that I'vebeen falsely raising the ammonia reading with the AmmoLock? I'm going to mix up 5g of salt in one of my buckets, test it with my Red Sea kit, and then add the recommend AmmoLock and test again. If that's actually my problem I'll be super relieved.

 

[PRock]

You should find out if your water company changed to chloramine and is using it instead of chlorine in your water.
If you use Prime for ammonia in your tank it will test like you have ammonia for a long time. I wonder if Ammo lock does the same thing.

Local water authority confirmed that they're using Chlorine.

 

[Cell]

Brandon finally stumped. Congrats!

 

[Cherie cook]

Brandon finally stumped. Congrats!

That’s not possible.

 

[brandon429]

Shocked that seneye reports close to .1
.00x is baseline when all things align


still not a .25 in anyones worst case scenario but I think seneye is misreading / calibration issue due to this

if bac were dead or harmed compounding would continue. Every stuck cycle thread ever made is tank perfect, no compounding, fish perfect, no symptoms but day to day a low level reading above whatever a given kit’s baseline is. Doesn’t line up with surface area mechanics. Seneye is new enough that is the first time we see it out of alignment like that and I’ll remember that / am very surprised



if we collect seneye data it shows shocking similarity

 

[PRock]

I have 2 batches of Salt mixing up right now, one for a test with the AmmoLock and another to do about a 40% water change. Unfortunately that's the last of my RODI, and I don't have a good RO membrane right now. I ordered replacements, but they won't be here until Monday. I'll be checking some of the other LFS's tomorrow to see if anyone has one in stock that I can grab locally to start making more water so I can do at least 2 more 40+% changes over the next week to get all of whatever the heck is causing these readings out of the water column.

 

[brandon429]

Curious here for sure

how do things look


today I started using the descriptive ‘working seneye’ when talking about what would be shown from the several seneye meters we have sampled last two years in a tank with full live rock and sand and happy animals. In making predictions about what ammonia would be even when a seneye isn’t used, we borrow from the context clues in pics + the seneye logs on file from hundreds.

Anyone you request a seneye log from, cycling up or started with already live rocks, never shows hundredths level free ammonia consistently on any day to day basis, matter of fact that running baseline above is the highest *intial* level of ammonia I’ve seen reported. One seneye user reported a dead tang he can’t get to made it go to high thousandths ppm but it never broke hundredths


how can a living system of excessive rocks and sand and live animals, not cloudy water as of today plus fish loss, be out of ammonia control


will seneye themselves admit the test can be wrong by a little, but not a lot? Where’s my one in 500 seneyes that randomly jolt up to 1.0 ppm, among happy fish and clean water

how is a mistake at the .001 level and never at the 1.0 one I might have to email seneye to look for admission or total rejection a misread could occur

 

[brandon429]

@Dan_P
here is one

Now seneye is risking api league. variance between the simple question can I reef now or not really lets me down...but not if we discover that certain maintenance / update or calibration steps are needed. Then it’s like any old fancy rocket malfunctioning, can be fixed and used.

or, ammonia varies between hundredths and *thousandths* (big jump for in-demand compounds) as a matter of variance, tank to tank, and the tanks sustain those differences and really don’t align home to home<—- if this is true I might take a posting sabbatical.


let the record reflect I propose when we get to to the bottom of this, whatever the true, accurate, conversion rate baseline is for one tank with rocks and sand will match another- if gross differences in organic sinking and benthic dieoff aren’t present such as a new tank with all kpi aquatics rock or someone’s pre crash dead algae littered everywhere system

seneye has said on their site that reefs are expected to convert in the thousandths, they picked that baseline somehow


two normal reefs, one in Stockholm using twenty tangs vs a pico reef in Lubbock that hasn’t seen a fish, are maintaining the same conversion rate tighter than this variance above, actual degree of variance tbd. Any reef that doesn’t maintain the conversion average is on its way to overnite crash, surface area is lacking. Can’t sustain days and days—no animal sustains without kidney function /nitrogenous waste control days and days and looks fine. They go sick, limp, fast and thats the analogy I like for reefs that seem unable, while happy levels in the tank look great.

 

[Dan_P]

@Dan_P
here is one

Now seneye is risking api league. variance between the simple question can I reef now or not really lets me down...but not if we discover that certain maintenance / update or calibration steps are needed. Then it’s like any old fancy rocket malfunctioning, can be fixed and used.

or, ammonia varies between hundredths and *thousandths* (big jump for in-demand compounds) as a matter of variance, tank to tank, and the tanks sustain those differences and really don’t align home to home<—- if this is true I might take a posting sabbatical.


let the record reflect I propose when we get to to the bottom of this, whatever the true, accurate, conversion rate baseline is for one tank with rocks and sand will match another- if gross differences in organic sinking and benthic dieoff aren’t present such as a new tank with all kpi aquatics rock or someone’s pre crash dead algae littered everywhere system

seneye has said on their site that reefs are expected to convert in the thousandths, they picked that baseline somehow


two normal reefs, one in Stockholm using twenty tangs vs a pico reef in Lubbock that hasn’t seen a fish, are maintaining the same conversion rate tighter than this variance above, actual degree of variance tbd. Any reef that doesn’t maintain the conversion average is on its way to overnite crash, surface area is lacking. Can’t sustain days and days—no animal sustains without kidney function /nitrogenous waste control days and days and looks fine. They go sick, limp, fast and thats the analogy I like for reefs that seem unable, while happy levels in the tank look great.

Seneye is like every other analytical device. It is not exempt from calibration. Their device can fail. It can be off. If their customers like to believe in the number that the Seneye device produces, that is their decision.

I am bit suspicious of a company that sells an analytical device that does not also tell you how to calibrate it or to test if it is malfunctioning. As far as drawing conclusions from Seneye data, be very careful. There is no way to validate it and that is bad science.

 

[brandon429]

well you had called that about two mos ago. nice job.

 

[Thespammailaccount]

Could be chloramines. Test your product water for ammonia using an ammonia test kit

 

[PRock]

Could be chloramines. Test your product water for ammonia using an ammonia test kit

I have, source water is showing 0 via Red Sea test kit.

 

[brandon429]

do you think the lfs could put you in contact with or do you know anyone else with a seneye to run a backup on a different machine

 

[PRock]

So here are the results of the following

• Red Sea Ammonia Test of new saltwater.
• Red Sea Ammonia Test of new saltwater about 5gal + 5ml of AmmoLock, which is a double dose, mixed for a few hours.
• Red Sea Ammonia Test of my tank today.
• Seneye Dashboard of the probe in the new saltwater.

Prior to placing the Seneye in the new salt my readings on the Seneye were

• NH3 0.082ppm
• NH4 13.96ppb (anyone know why Seneye uses ppm for NH3 and ppb for NH4?)
• PH 8.12
• Temp 78.1

The Red Sea Ammonia test is telling me that there's Ammonia in there, but no cloudy water, no apparent fish stress, the only things showing stress are the corals and nems. Water change now in progress with the last of the RODI I was able to scrounge up today, hopefully my new RO membrane will be here tomorrow and I can start cranking out water again.

 

[PRock]

So here are the results of the following

• Red Sea Ammonia Test of new saltwater.
• Red Sea Ammonia Test of new saltwater about 5gal + 5ml of AmmoLock, which is a double dose, mixed for a few hours.
• Red Sea Ammonia Test of my tank today.
• Seneye Dashboard of the probe in the new saltwater.

Prior to placing the Seneye in the new salt my readings on the Seneye were

• NH3 0.082ppm
• NH4 13.96ppb (anyone know why Seneye uses ppm for NH3 and ppb for NH4?)
• PH 8.12
• Temp 78.1

The Red Sea Ammonia test is telling me that there's Ammonia in there, but no cloudy water, no apparent fish stress, the only things showing stress are the corals and nems. Water change now in progress with the last of the RODI I was able to scrounge up today, hopefully my new RO membrane will be here tomorrow and I can start cranking out water again.

On the bright side, it looks like it might be the AmmoLock that's causing the readings, because it's obviously impacted the Red Sea test (I'm reading the first one as 0, and the second one as 0.2). But the Seneye is insane I suspect.

 

[PRock]

Here's my back and forth with Seneye so far -

Hey Seneye -

I'm having problems with my Seneye Reef. According to what my app and
the cloud dashboard say my Ammonia levels are currently in the alarm
range - 0.052ppm and climbing. However, my NH4 numbers are down around
13ppb and I "thought" from reading your answers pages that the ratio of
NH3 to NH4 in the water should be something like 15 to 20% NH3 and 80 to
85% NH4, so if my NH3 reading is 52ppb I'd expect the NH4 value to be
way north of 13ppb, somewhere in the 350ppb range? Am I understanding
this wrong or is there something strange going on with my sensor?

-Paul

Good afternoon Paul,

Thank you for getting in touch with us,

We have had a look at your account today and we can see that the raw values look a little low which usual means the slide is not fitted correctly whic can lead to strange Nh3 and pH readings.

Please can you take the slide out of the device, make sure the windows in the device are free from dirt and algae and then refit the slide under water.

In regards to caluctions from the device, we urge customers not to try and calculate the Nh3 or Nh4 using either value, if you are referring to our page about the difference between Nh3 and Nh3 this is a guidline and is based on many differnt factors, the Nh4 value is a purely calculated value therefore, we wouldn't rely on this to try and work out the Nh3. The Nh3 is the important one to concentrate on anyway as this is the toxic form of ammonia and therefore, monitored directly.

Kind regards,

Seneye Support Team

Hey there Seneye -
So I've soaked the device in a 5% citric acid solution for 30 minutes, scrubbed with a brush, replaced the slide (multiple times) and installed the slide under water to make sure I don't have any air bubbles or anything like that stuck between the sensor and the slide. My device is showing crazy high levels of ammonia, and is even telling me that the ammonia is at 0.07ppm in a fresh batch of saltwater that I just mixed up yesterday. Anything else I can try? or has my Seneye gone nuts?

Good afternoon Paul,

Thank you for the response, we have checked your data again today and raw data is a lot higher which is good news.

Although, we don't recommend it, please, remember if you are moving device in between different bodies of water it will take a little while for the slide to fully soak through and calibrate.
However, if you are still concerned about the readings, please can you send in a picture of your slide so we can see both sensor pads, we can then check it has not been damaged or compromised leading to strange readings.

Thank you,

Kind regards,

Seneye Support Team

If I'm moving the sensor between different bodies of water, how long should I wait? The device was in the newly mixed saltwater for about an hour, showing 0.070ppm NH3 or higher the whole time.

Also, as requested, here are some pictures of both sides of my current slide.

Thanks!

 

[brandon429]

what helpful research and Im following along here, I dont know how those machines work at all. Im into their trending based on user reports this is educational for sure

 

[PRock]

More from Seneye Support

Hi Paul,

Thanks for sending us over those pictures. While the device is plugged in are there any white lights on under where the slide sits in the device at all?

I can see a lot of purple on the NH3 side of the slide which is indicative of ammonia being present in the water. The white circle could indicate a light firing more than usual on the device.

Kind regards,

Seneye Support Team

Yes, there’s a white light that appears to be constantly on under the slide, and a red light flashing periodically where the light sensor is.