Nitrates 0 Causing lower pH?

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Ammonia is still reading high. Everything else has been the same as well. My babies are doing great though! I aggressively vacuumed the gravel and cleaned the under gravel filter the 14th. I changed the filter cartridge as the other one was a few weeks old(I rinsed the old one out every week). The water has really cleared up a lot and the pH is maintaining a 7.4. I am still unsure why the ammonia reads so high. I had thought it might be old or something, but I had used it on my tap water and my beta fish bowl and it reads those correctly.

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I'm out of town, but I go back Monday. My grandma has been left in charge with feeding my babies. So far, so good.

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5/21/12
10pm

Nitrites 0
Nitrates 0
Ammonia 8.0 (I'm going to do some research on this)
pH 7.4

Tazman

That high of a level of ammonia is absolutely lethal to fish, if you have any in the tank, you need to do a massive water change extremely soon. The damage that would have caused to the fish is going to seriously shorten their lives.

eug

When did you set up this tank, and when did you introduce fish? It does sound awfully similar to what happens when you add fish to an uncycled tank - ammonia spike (where you are at now), followed by a decrease in ammonia but a sudden appearance and then spike in nitrite.

Can you see if a 50% water change reduces the ammonia level to half of your current readings, i.e. 4 ppm?

Byron

The ammonia at 8 in basic water (pH 7.4) is not possible or the fish would be dead. According to the API data, at ammonia of 2-3 ppm fish would all show stress, clamped fins, rapid gill movement, and deaths. At 4-5 ppm deaths would be over half the fish. If as you've said previously there is absolutely no sign of stress, one of the numbers (ammonia or pH) just can't be accurate.

Adamson

I would kill for 6.4 ph without aldar cones etc.

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It was cycled before I added fish. I've had them for almost three months now.

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What about AmmoniUM?

I also found out (just did a water change and I don't know why i didn't think of this before) that the water from our bathroom is 1.0-2.0 ppm ammonia. Before today, I would rinse of the filter cartridge in that water. Today I used the kitchen tap which is the one that reads 0.25 ppm ammonia for the cartridge. I always use the kitchen water for the water changes and condition the water.

Would rinsing the cartridge in 1.0-2.0 ppm have a large effect on the tank? I'm not going to use that water anymore, but I was just wondering.

Going to check levels soon once the water has cycled through the filter.

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Forgot to mention on 5/21/12 that the water was no longer cloudy. I'm not sure when it first cleared up though because I was out of town and my grandma doesn't remember.

As of today my fish are still behaving normally(behavior of normal can be found in earlier posts). I have seen no signs of stress and I was home almost all day and night yesterday in my room (where the tank is located), so they behave normally at all hours. They do, however, do that weird thing where they swim almost straight down in place at night, but they have been doing that since I bought them and I have read that a lot of tiger barbs from places like petsmart do that. They only do it after the light goes off though... could it be that they are temporarily blind once the light cuts off?