We are having some problems with our plant growth. We decided to test the nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, and pH again today to try to solve the problem. The nitrate and nitrite levels were at 0 but the ammonia level was at .25 which is higher than the book suggests. We had already lost some water over the weekend and we took some more out and replaced it with distilled water to try to solve the problem. We also are going to feed the fish less because we noticed that there was some food settled at the bottom and over feeding can lead to high ammonia. We hope that these fixes will help solve our ammonia problem and even our pH problem which was over 7. If we can fix these problems the plants should start to grow again.
Another group gave us two of their fish today so we added them to our system in hopes that it will make our system better.
You might want to try and pull the water out and replace it with a all new source, you can then use the old water slowly to dilute it more
I’m not sure what type of plants you have, but I would research the correct pH for those plants. I think that one of the reasons our plants are growing so slow is because of our high pH level.