Cycling My Baby Biorb 15L

[SlashmanJones]

Hello,
 
I am very new to the fish keeping hobby. My girlfriend got me a Baby Biorb 15L for Christmas. The last fish tank I had was a Goldfish bowl when I was 5, and my goodness has the game changed.
 
Anyways, I did as the instructions said, I dumped the bacteria in, waited a day, and went to get a beta fish.  Admittedly, I knew nothing about cycling the tank. After I got the betta, I got about 6 ghost shrimps and a mystery snail. Over the next week or so, they all died.  Me being overzealous about fish keeping most definitely lead to their demise.  
 
I have the API freshwater testing kit, and I did a test yesterday. As a note, My tank has been set up for about 3 weeks and I've done 2 50% water changes.  All the readings are within the normal range, but the nitrite test is still quite high.  It is a very dark purple, indicating a high level of nitrite.
 
My question is this: Basically, where do I go from here? How do I reduce the nitrite levels to where it would be acceptable to put fish into? Is it a situation where I should start over and do a fish less cycle?  
 
Thank you in advance for the information; I've only been a "fish keeper" for a few weeks but it is extremely interesting to me.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

If you are following the fishless cycling guide on the site, you will see you do nothing until your nitrite drops. The API kits uses a scale called the total ion scale to read nitrogen compounds such as ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. This scale is different from the one science uses which is called the nitrogen scale, In fishless cyccling the difference is onlt important in that you wish to avoid levels of ammonia higher than 5 ppm on the nitrogen scale.
 
But to make sense of that 5 ppm using API kits on needs to do the sort of math where one converts miles to kilometers. For ammonia this means that the 5 ppm danger level on yuour API kit is not 5.0 but rather it is 6.4 ppm. This difference is magnified each step along the cycle. yhis means that 5 ppm of nitrite on the nitrogen scale would read 16.4 ppm on an API kit. Unfortunately these kits only go up to 5 ppm. And this is what you re seeing now.
 
If you followed the cycling instructions here the are designed to prevent you from getting to a danger level of nitrites even though you can not read them on the API kit. 3 ppm of ammonia will produce about 7.65 ppm of nitrite. Since the max number of ammonia additions suggested before nitrite come back down to readable levels is only 7.ppm, the most nitrite that might make is 17.85 ppm. Now this would be over the limit if no nitrite bacteria were colonizing. Furthermore, the additions of ammonia are timed so they can never produce that total amount of nitrite. As the nitrite bacs begin to multiply they are converting some nitrite to nitrate and at an ever increasing rate. And this initial reproduction is sufficient to prevent nitrite from reaching level that can stall the cycle.
 
This is a very long winded explanation of why you cannot read your nitrites accurately at the moment, why they do not appear to be dropping yet but also why you should not be concerned. All you need is to be a bit more patience and they will drop under 5 ppm. bear in mind that cycling is not a formula that works identically in every tank, the time and reading guidelines are just that since every tank is a bit different. Some go right on schedule, some go faster and some go slower.

 

[SlashmanJones]

Thank you for the response.