cupramine?? ammonia??

[cuz]

just curious on everyons thoughts.. I noticed after day three of cupramine treatment my ammonia levels spiked through the roof!! Its only a 29 gal qt tank and i've already changed out 10 gal of water to try and drop the numbers with not much sucess. i've gone from 0.8, 0.7, to 0.6. I've got 10 more gallons mixed and ready to go pending wich way everyone answers. I picked up "ammolock" at the lfs tonight at their recomondation,after a bit of on-line research i found that it can effect the use of copper turning it lethal?? Now is this only with copper and not cupramine? Should i avoid it and keep changing water to lower ammonia to nothing?

p.s. I have not re-plenished the cupramine levels yet for each water change till the peram's level out. so i may need to start the treatment over for another 14 days after tonights headaches are solved!!
thanks in advance!!

[cuz]

anybody heard of cupramine throwing off ammonia test kits??

[marie]

I haven't heard anything about throwing off test kits but I do know copper is hell on the bacteria needed in the nitrogen cycle.
When I use cupramine, I don't bother with trying to cycle the tank before I add fish. I just do 50% water changes daily and if necessary twice daily ...having a small hospital tank helps

Oh and everytime I do a water change I add enough cupramine to bring the copper concentration back to proper levels

[cchomistek]

I would keep up with the water change. Its kind of a catch 22 because you may get the ammonia down but then once you start dosing the copper again the denitrifying bacteria will be killed off by the copper treatment and the ammonia will spike again, in theory.

[Ryan]

Its only a matter of time though before there is no more bacteria and the fish waste is what is causing the spike. It will be less of a spike but there will be some.

[cuz]

copied this from Seachem's website under the FAQ section:

Q: I'm using Cupramine™ and my ammonia test kit is showing ammonia off the scale. What is going on?

A: Ammonia test kits can not distinguish ammonia from the amine based complex present in Cupramine™ and will therefore give a false high reading for ammonia while using Cupramine™. Our Ammonia Alert™ and MultiTest: Free & Total Ammonia™ test kit do not suffer from this problem as they utilize a gas exchange technology that can distinguish ammonia from amines.

[cuz]

basically another question... was i supposed to remove all live rock prior to treatment? I just used a few disposable peices out of my display to help with biological filtration. Is the bacteria in my rocks dying off causing spikes? If so how do fowlr tanks treat copper without risking dy-off??