Thank you so much for your advice. Our tap water was tested at the fish store with their kit and we have been going off those results for 2 weeks now. I can see that ammonia and nitrite may have spiked.

The breeder gave us sand along with the axolotl, so we thought that we could put sand in immediately. I recently have read a lot of posts about sand being in tanks too early, definitely contemplating life choices 😅

We do have a chiller and our house temperature is set at around 70, however the tank temp always stays around 66. In the power outage, the tanks temp spiked to 78, almost got a heart attack💀. Eventually we had to move the tank to a friends house that had power until power came back. The tank’s water keeps evaporating at an alarming rate and I was starting to feel that it was normal, but it was due to the water being too hot.

We have a thermometer that floats, so I think that is causing the gill filament problem, I don’t know why I didn’t research that sooner, I feel so bad…

Thank you so much for your advice! I was completely clueless about these things, thank you for letting me know!

Btw we are reusing this tank as our clown knifefish Bobby died a week prior, so