[asylumdown]

I have used it yes. It's the one I use when I get new fish and need to monitor ammonia during the tank transfer protocol. I attempted a couple of iffy fish in the past few months that never made it out of QT, so I've used it recently. Expires in 2017. I also re-ran it using RO water and freshly mixed salt water. There's definitely ammonia in my system.

Since you only need to worry about ammonia during the tank transfer protocol, I haven't had a nitrite kit since I cycled this tank two years ago. I'll pick one up tomorrow.

I'm starting to develop an operating theory, but seeing as I never tested for ammonia until today I'll never really know for sure. It's very long so don't anyone feel the need to read it, but if someone wants to critique my thinking I'm happy to hear it.

In November I had a crazy cyano problem. To fix it I double-dosed the tank with chemi-clean (as in, repeated the treatment after 48 hours and a water change). I then immediately started dosing huge quantities of MB7. The effect on the system was pronounced - white bacterial slimes started growing like mad on the glass, my biopellet reactor turned in to a mulmy soup, and things generally just got really gross in ways they had never done before. It eventually lead to my biopellet reactor clogging up and failing, which is what I thought started all of this. I then took the reactor offline, cleaned it, and put it back online with a drastically enlarged effluent pipe and the same volume of pellets. Where I had been dosing something ridiculous like 70mL of MB7/day for the two weeks after the chemiclean treatment, I think I only did one or two doses of 10 mL after putting the reactor back together. I wasn't paying close enough attention to the tank or dates, but things started dying within a couple of days of that, followed closely a cyano outbreak of biblical proportions.

In March I shut down everything but the skimmer, started changing huge volumes of water every day, culminating in one massive 60% water change. I also re-dosed with chemiclean, which wiped out the cyano. Everything started to recover. At the end of March I put the reactor back online with a teeny tiny amount of pellets and dosed MB7 for a while. A month later, things fall apart again.

Contrary to what the makers of chemiclean would like people to believe, I'm pretty sure the active ingredient of that product is a form of erythromycin. They make a point of stating it contains no erythromycin succinate, which is a whole lot more specific than saying it contains no erythromycin, as there's 4 other kinds of erythromycin that I know of (estolate, stearate, gluceptate, and lactobionate according to wikipedia). Erythromycin works against gram positive bacteria, and all the "good" bacteria in a tank like nitrosomonas (the guys who munch on ammonia) are gram positive.

They probably get away with saying its safe because the kind they're using has less activity against the nitrifiers. The "true" nitrifiers metabolize and divide like a hundred times slower than cyano and heterotrophic bacteria, and erythromycin damages bacteria by making it hard for them to build cell walls, something that is particularly important during cell division. This should mean that a 48 hour treatment should be far less harmful to "true" nitrifiers than cyano and heterotrophs that divide every couple of hours, but it most certainly would have an effect on them.

In most people's tanks, I'm sure the effect is small enough to not cause any harm. But I double dosed. Then I started dosing with mad quantities of rapidly reproducing heterotrophs in an environment rich in organic carbon. And I have a 10 inch cow fish that eats more food every day than most people feed in a week. Since heterotrophs can also facultatively use ammonia as an energy source, I've read theories that suggest providing excess carbon during a cycle can lead to the rapidly reproducing heterotrophs outcompeting the nitrifiers for space and resources, creating a "false" cycle. When the heterotroph populations inevitably crash for whatever reason (run out of carbon or some other nutrient), there's nothing left to pick up the slack and ammonia levels start to fluctuate - long after the reefer has stopped measuring it. The theory is that this creates many of the phantom stability issues that plague new tanks.

It's very possible that this was all started by an OD of organic carbon when I modified my reactor, but it's also possible that the chemiclean treatment damaged my tank's capacity to process the massive amount of poop my fish make and I exacerbated/masked that by dosing huge volumes of MB7 in an organic carbon rich environment. It's possible that when the reactor clogged, they lost their food source and the population crashed, and my tank started to cycle and I just didn't know it. By the time I added the reactor back to the system there could have already been detectable levels of ammonia in my water, which, coupled with a sudden massive over-dose of organic carbon with hardly any bacterial dosing at all, caused a nasty positive feedback loop of corals death, causing more ammonia, causing more coral death.

I never measured it, so I can't say there was any ammonia in the water then for sure, but doing a series of enormous water changes fixed the problem. But then I dosed chemiclean AGAIN.

If any of the novel I just typed out is accurate, what I essentially had at the beginning of April was an unstable, half un-cycled 375 gallon tank packed to the gills with stressed SPS corals and a ridiculous bio-load. There were probably low levels of ammonia building up, but I was doing 20% water changes every 5 days or more at the beginning of April. I didn't, however, do a water change in the last two weeks of April, I just tested everything but ammonia. It wouldn't have taken much of a rise to push my already stressed corals back over the edge, creating another positive feedback loop.

I should also mention that during all of this, my blue-throat trigger developed a horrible case of pop-eye. It got a lot better after those big water changes, but last week it exploded again. It looks like his eyeball is actually going to explode. A couple of months ago I also started really noticing the gills of my copper-band butterfly. As in they're particularly red and engorged looking, but I thought that was normal and I had just had never noticed it before. Two weeks ago though, he developed a tumour under one of his gill flaps. My Richmond's wrasse has also been having some dermatological issues on one side. It looks like he's been trying to de-scale himself. I thought they were all unrelated, but put this all together and you get a picture of ammonia poisoning.

Again, all conjecture, but it's theoretically possible.

I've taken the pellets off the system, done a water change and dosed enough prime to get a zero reading on my ammonia test. I'm going to try and ride this out, and find a new home for the biggest ammonia contributor in my tank.