Checkup On Fishless Cyclin

[nijohnnyuk]

I have added 10 drops of ammonia to my 21l tank (hope it's not too much)

Do I wait an hour or so then and test nitrite and get the reading to ppm?

What happens then?

 

[BigIan]

do an amonia test and check to see if the amonia is up at 5 ppm.


if it is test it again tomorrow, if not add more amonia,

then test every day untill you see the amonia drop,
the amonia drop indicates that the bacteria that convert the ammonia to nitrItes have started to grow.
thenh you should test for nitrates, nitrites and ammonia, every day.

when the amonia drops to around one ppm you should add more amonia to bring it back up to 5 ppm.

you are fully cycled when your nitrites are at 0 and your amonia drops from 5 ppm to 0 within 12 hours.


hope this helps

 

[mark.w.jones]

How did you know that 10 drops was the right amount? If your ammonia is really strong you might only need 3 drops to get 5ppm in your tank. If it's weaker you may have to add 20+. It also depends on the volume your medicine dropper drops at. You should have filled a bucket with 10 litres of dechlorinated water then used that to test how many drops gave you 5ppm then multiplied up to work out how many drops would give 5ppm in your actual tank.

As BigIan said you basically raise the level of ammonia in your tank to 5ppm then wait for it to drop to zero or really near to zero. In the beginning it might be a few days before you need to add any more ammonia but eventually you should be adding ammonia daily. After 3 - 4 days I was topping up ammonia with the same number of drops every morning before work and testing water stats as soon as I got back in the evening.

After a while you should begin to get increased nitrite levels which will not drop for around 2 weeks. Keep going with the daily addition of ammonia (if you need it) when this happens and be patient. The nitrite takes forever to go.