Fishless Cycle Log

[coldcazzie]

Didn't test yesterday as had one of those days where *everything* happens!

Day 28 (20.9.09)
Ammonia: 1ppm. Nitrite: 0ppm. Nitrate: 10ppm. pH: 7.6+.

I thought the ammonia was supposed to drop before the nitrite did?! Going to clean test tubes thoroughly and test again in a bit. Any advice please? Am rather confused - that's not the results I was expecting.

 

[Gr44]

The Nitrite can only be processed once it exists, if the Ammonia hasn't yet been processed then it can't do anything with it.

Looks to me like most of the ammonia has been processed, all of the nitrite from the back of that has been processed in turn, but you still have more ammonia to be processed (once it does, you'll have nitrite to be processed)

You don't have any thing else in the tank adding Ammonia do you? decaying plants/food etc?

It does seem a bit odd though... maybe OM47/Waterdrop can help a little more!!

 

[coldcazzie]

Nope, nothing else in there other than 3 silk plants.

I thoroughly cleaned and dried the test tubes, as well as the syringe I'm using to remove water, then repeated the ammonia and nitrite tests, and made hubby check them to make sure I wasn't reading it wrong and the results were exactly the same - ammonia: 1ppm and nitrite: 0ppm.

Hoping wd/OM47 will have something reassuring to say as well! Thanks man

 

[OldMan47]

The race between ammonia and nitrite processing bacteria is usually easily won by the A-bacs because they need to be present before you will get any nitrites. The jump start that you gave your filter a week or two back may have gotten the N-bacs established along side of the A-bacs and now they are running a bit ahead. Just a bit of speculation on what might explain your present situation. Either way, when you see numbers dropping for either poison, it is almost always a good sign.

 

[coldcazzie]

Day 29 (21.9.09)
Ammonia: 0.25ppm. Nitrite: 0ppm. Nitrate: 5ppm. pH: 7.6+.

Do I wait until I have a 0ppm reading for Ammonia before dosing again?

PS. thanks!

 

[waterdrop]

Hi CC,

We usually advise to grit your teeth and wait another day until ammonia is a true zero ppm before adding ammonia at your usual "add-hour" out of the 24 hour day. Sometimes I think this lets everything get down to zero for a bit and might be good but this is pure speculation. However, if it were to still sit at .25ppm tomorrow I'd probably go ahead and add back to 4ppm or so. There is a "sticking" syndrome we often see near the end where one or the other of ammonia or nitrite(NO2) will just persist in showing some (usually fairly small) amount day after day. I don' pretend to understand it, its just an observation and another observation is that it will eventually go away if one simply proceeds as normal.

Now, about that "why?" question I hear you asking in your comment about the timing of ammonia vs. nitrite(NO2)... With these questions I think it always helps to step back and visualize a graph with quantities of the substances on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis and picture that our nitrogen passes along from left to right as a hump. First we squirt in our milliliters of ammonia, creating the hump, then the A-Bacs move the hump to the right, changing it to nitrite(NO2) and the N-Bacs chomp on it and move it to the right creating NO3.

Now when we take a battery of tests with our test kit and log them in our aquarium notebook, we are taking a momentary "snapshot" in time. We really have no idea at that moment whether the value we see is a point on an up slope or on a down slope. If our ammonia was always added at the same time of day and our tests were always taking at the same time of day then we have added confidence about the regularity of our snapshots...but....

If we do anything like water changes or changes to our test times, just as examples, then we'd expect our humps we're graphing and/or the consistency of our snapshot sequence to blur and be less understandable. Of course, on top of that, not even the best of the bacteriologists would tell you they fully understand the life cycle the biofilm structures that each bacterial species builds, much less how it might be effected by other species working nearby or other tank factors.

The "end game" of fishless cycling can be just as unpredictable as the other phases (eg. nitrite spike phase seeming to take too long, initial drop of ammonia seeming to take forever) but that's just a characteristic of "in vitro biology" (to put a good sounding but wrong name on it, lol) rather than "chemistry lab."

~~waterdrop~~

 

[coldcazzie]

Well, I tested just now, and it was at 0ppm.

I thought I'd do it now because my regular test time is after the school run on a morning so dosing needs to be 12 hours before that. Thought I'd test to see if it was at 0 and if it was then dose with 1.25ml.

So, have added 1.25ml ammonia at about 9.30pm (and nearly gassed myself by not opening the back door first! ), and will test tomorrow morning and see what happens. I don't expect it to drop to 0-0 in 12 hours, but I think by switching to 12 hour testing now I'll have a better snapshot as you've so eloquently put it

 

[ebross67]

You have bee doing this for 30 days - not encouraging. I'm currently cycling and nothing. It's been 3 weeks. I've tried all the brands of bacteria boosters with no avail. In your posts you have said you check ammonia readings a couple hours later. In my experience I have noticed it takes 24hrs to get a true reading (after applying ammonia). You maybe overdosing your tank. It took me 3 days to build to 5ppm of ammonia (10 drops a day or 1.5ml). You also stated that you have no substrate in the tank. I have read that most of the bacteria live in the gravel. I want to find some lava rock and put it into the tank (again heard lava rock is a good home for bacteria). Good luck with your cycle - I'll be following this thread.

 

[waterdrop]

The two autotrophic species we need for cycling will colonize any surface area with the right characteristics, including the gravel, decorations and similar surfaces in the tank. While this is interesting and will indeed contribute a bit to the nitrification process of a very mature tank, it is generally felt to be of little practical use to fishless cyclers of a new tank with new substrate and decorations. This "tank contribution" is swamped by the much larger bacterial activity going on in the filter, which should be providing the optimal surfaces, ammonia flow (because the water is being significantly moved by) and oxygen flow (again, because fresh water is constantly moved past the biomedia substrates.) There is fairly large variation in how well filters provide the ideal bacterial conditions but there is little controversey that they all generally do it better than the other areas of the tank.

Household aqueous ammonia is a pretty well controlled way to dose a tank. With a modern filter that has been chosen to have an adequate flow rate for the tank it would be unusual for the ammonia not to have dispersed evenly throughout the volume within less than an hour and pretty certainly within a couple hours I believe. I suspect if you had trouble with the ammonia concentration continuing to elevate that this may have been due to the bottled bacteria products, which contain a lot of organic material in the form of dead bacteria and other debris. In some cases the stated goal of the product is to provide organic debris (the same as excess fishfood would do) to feed the clouds of heterotrophic bacteria which will turn it into ammonia, meaning that it is just an indirect way of duplicating what the fishless cycler is already doing with the household ammonia.

I don't think that the fellows on the internet who gradually worked out the process of fishless cycling ever intended or suspected that it would be a "faster" way to prepare a biofilter. In the beginning it was just fascinating that it could be done "fishlessly" at all! The length of time it takes to culture the correct bacteria is overwhelmingly limited by the slow growth characteristics of the particular bacteria. The fact that optimal growth conditions are difficult to provide and still considered to be partly unknown by science (it gets studied in the WWTP area) and that the starting populations vary wildly does not help at all of course.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[coldcazzie]

Day 30 (22.9.09)
12hr
Ammonia: 2ppm. Nitrite: unsure (explain in a mo). Nitrate: 5ppm (think I need a new kit!). pH: 7.6+.

24hr
Ammonia: 0.25ppm. Nitrite: still unsure.

Nitrite test was clear/v pale grey this morning. Thought I'd miscounted the drops so tested again and it came back the same, so I thoroughly washed the test tube. Tested this evening and, although much darker, it was still grey. Not even close to blue, pink or purple like on the colour chart. What could cause this?

Thought maybe it might be unclean test tube so have washed in vinegar and rinsed thoroughly and will test again in the morning, but if it's not any better then what could it be?

I'm hoping that the much darker grey this evening was a sign that the nitrites were higher cuz of ammonia processing, and just that the colour was a bit off...

 

[OldMan47]

Cazzie is cycling a home made sponge WD so her time to get good mixing may be different than what our experiences have taught us. I must accept it when she says that it can take much longer for good mixing in her tank than I am used to seeing. After all she is the one on the scene that can really know what is happening. I am a bit concerned about her cycle for another reason. She does not have very good water circulation, so even with a fully cycled filter, she may see some measurable ammonia in her tank just due to the transport times involved. I think she should be looking for a better way to move water through her filter so that things don't need to wait all day to be processed by the filter. My own guess is that the tank would be greatly helped by using a power head to move water through that home made filter. I have lots of them that I got off of E-Bay for $10 or so a few months ago for the ones intended for use in 20 to 50 gallon tanks. The AC power head intended for 10 gallons is a waste of money because it is hard to connect to a filter of any sort. I press them into service when I need one but they are something that I just have on the shelf to use as needed.

 

[coldcazzie]

Day 31 (23.9.09)
36hr
Ammonia: 0ppm. Nitrite: still grey, so don't know, but back to pale grey again rather than dark grey. Added 1.25ml Ammonia.

Think I need to buy a new nitrite test kit, but earliest I can get one is Friday. Even if I ordered one online today I'd be lucky to get it before Friday anyway.

I have to say that since putting the bit of material over the end of the airlift tube in my filter the water flow has been better - presumably because it's not getting blocked with gravel. And I'm quite pleased that even though the water mixing ability of the filter is not great, this dosage of ammonia has dropped to 0 within 36 hours, so maybe it's not as terrible at the mixing as I thought. But I guess only time will tell on that.

12hr
Ammonia: 0.5-1ppm. Nitrite: a darker grey than this morning. *sigh!*

 

[waterdrop]

Oh, that explains it OM, I understand much better now, thanks! WD

 

[coldcazzie]

Day 32 (24.9.09)
24hr
Ammonia: 0ppm. Nitrite: still grey. Nitrate: 5ppm (don't believe that for a second!). pH: 7.6+.

Didn't dose with ammonia despite it dropping back to 0 as I don't think the nitrite is back to 0 yet. Will dose again this evening and buy new nitrite/nitrate kits in the morning and hopefully then I'll have a clearer picture of what's going on.

Bacterial colonies are definitely growing though - only 24hrs to get to 0 this time, rather than 36 last time

36hr
Didn't test, just added 1.25ml ammonia. Roll on the new test kits!

 

[coldcazzie]

Day 33 (25.9.09)
12hr: Ammonia: 0.25ppm.
24hr: Ammonia: 0ppm. Nitrite: (with a new kit) still grey. Nitrate: (also new kit) 5-10ppm. 1.25ml Ammonia added.

Day 34 (26.9.09)
No tests - decorating all day and I completely forgot until I was already in bed!

Day 35 (27.9.09)
36hrs since ammonia: Ammonia: 0ppm. Nitrite: 5+ppm. Nitrate: 5-10ppm. 1.25ml Ammonia added.

I thought there was no way the new kit could be buggered too, so I looked very closely at nitrite as I was doing it and drops turned indigo when reaching the bottom. Why didn't any of yous tell me I was in a nitrite spike? I went and bought new kits for no reason! Grr.

12hr: Ammonia: 0ppm. Nitrite: 5+ppm.

Woohoo ammonia now being processed in 12 hours!