High Nitrite For Over 3 Weeks

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OK, I added some more baking soda. Will retest the PH in the morning when I get home from work. My tap water ph is about 7.5 It does seem to fluctuate quite a bit. I did buy sand for the bottom of the tank I intend to have cichlids in that is supposed to help raise the PH. Thank you for all of your advice.

In my view,
If your Tapwater test's at pH 7.5 and this is water going into the tank,then no baking soda,crushed coral, is needed for bacterial development.Ditto if you are using sand designed for cichlids.
It is only with ph levels below 7.0 that any noticeable slowing down of bacterial development could be measured to any significant degree.
If nitrite levels were still high going on three weeks of fishless cycling with ammonia, I might consider reducing ammonia dose by half and see what results brought .

I respectfully disagree with this for this particular case. While it is true that it's really only down low, approaching the 6's that we as crude testers with our hobby test kits and general observers of the cycling days of our one tank that we see big slow-downs, it is not true that there are not optimizations that have been observed. The autotrophic growth curves that peak in a plateau at pH 8.0 to 8.4 was derived from multiple tank laboratory work that Hovanec and others did and that he has discussed from time to time. I deem it to be significantly better than many of our more haphazard hobbyist/forum seat-of-the-pants observations. Since this particular fishless cycle was beginning to show signs of being among the longer ones we see, it seemed useful to try all of the optimizations we've got. I completely agree with you that if we don't see signs of slowness then there's not much call for tweeking up from the mid 7's to the mid-8's but in this case it seemed worth trying.

For the tank that overshot and showed an 8.8 it is a simple matter of a partial water change to ease it back down a small amount. Lisa, I certainly agree with anon02 that paying attention to your stocking and having that plan go toward fish that like more mineral content is a much, much better way to plan than any sort of mineral content alteration of the water after the fishless cycle is over. It is extremely hard to judge what the tank chemistry with fish will be by looking at any of the fishless cycle data (even though the qualifying week is better, it's still pretty bad for judging.)

~~waterdrop~~