high ammonia and dirty water

Question
I have a 50 gallon saltwater tank that was set up 10-11 weeks ago.  3 pieces of live rock about 20 lbs altogether.  Added them 1 piece at a time.   Added snails and hermit crabs 5 weeks ago and 4 weeks ago put to many new fish in all at once and everything died with-in 2 days. Ammonia went from 0ppm to 8ppm. Have been waiting for ammonia levels to come down but they haven't. It has been 3-4 weeks since everything died and the ammonia just keeps going up.  Tank also has what looks like a brown alge bloom going on right now.  (Water looks dirty/cloudy.)  Changed 25% of the water 3 times until pet store told me not to touch the tank.   Changed the filter 2 times and vacumed the gravel once before I read that I shouldn't have done that either.  Any information as to what I should be doing?  Thanks very much. Sandy

Answer


Sandy,

When you change the filter/vacume out the gravel you lose beneficial bacteria.This hurts your tank in dealing with the conversion of Ammonia. How many fish did you place into the tank.  It seems that you overloaded it. 5 fish should be the max in this tank due to the bioload. I would do a 50%
water change with cured salt water.  Right now monitor your NH3 everyday and it will drop.  Also let your bacteria build up. The nh3
gets recycled into nitrite. The dirty water is from the algae, it may be a bloom because of the high NH3. This may take another month for everything to return to normal. Your tank will need to recycle itself.    
Let me know how this works and we will go through step two.
Thanks Todd