You may just be thinking you'll see these things in much shorter time frames than you really will. The very first 4-5ppm dose of ammonia to a new fishless cycling tank may not show any "due-to-bacteria" drop in ppm concentration for a week (or even up to 3 weeks we've seen in a few bad cases.) Yes, this is just the first drop from the very first dose that I'm talking about, not any re-dosings.
When you first begin it can be hard to work out the actual best dosing amount. You need to use both the ammonia calculator on your site and also your judgement about the 4-5ppm color match when you measure 20 to 40 minutes after dosing. I like to see what the calculator suggests, then go in initially a little less than that, then of course measure later to see what I think I got. Write all this down and think about it and adjust it further. You do not ever want an extended exposure up in the 8ppm range because that encourages the wrong species of bacteria and can ultimately slow down the whole process. Don't worry though, you would have to do that for an extended period of days, so if you got a reading of 8ppm then just do a partial water change to bring that down to the needed 4ppm or so.
The whole fishless cycling process often takes 70 days or so in slow cases, so worrying about things on a day to day basis is pretty useless, a log of a whole week of results begins to get interesting. That is why a good log of posted data with daily edits of that first post is really the best way to go about it. The members here are great and will give the needed encouragement since patience is so hard and they will also look for things you might miss, such as pH crashes and the like.
~~waterdrop~~
