Ammonia source

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Tim Axten

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What do people use when doing a fishless cycle ? Fairly new so donā€™t want to use pure ammonia and couldnā€™t find a safe one local anyway. Also how long till the food starts giving off ammonia, when should i add the majority of the live bacteria and do I need to replace or remove the food that is rotting before it gets really funky ?
 
I once put a single algae wafer into an uncycled tank as an experiment. Within 24 hours the ammonia was off the chart
 
Using a bottle of ammonia is the easiest way to cycle. The bacteria don't know where it's come from. When using fish food, you cannot know if the tank can process 3 ppm ammonia in 24 hours. If you really don't want to use bottled ammonia, put the fish food into a bucket of water, then when ammonia is produced, use that water to add to the tank. It will involve some calculation to work out how much to add though.
 
Using a bottle of ammonia is the easiest way to cycle. The bacteria don't know where it's come from. When using fish food, you cannot know if the tank can process 3 ppm ammonia in 24 hours. If you really don't want to use bottled ammonia, put the fish food into a bucket of water, then when ammonia is produced, use that water to add to the tank. It will involve some calculation to work out how much to add though.
Thank you very helpfull, what are the calculations I would need to make ?
 
You have a bucket of water that contained a certain volume of water and the ammonia was at a certain ppm. Pick some totally random figures.

10 litre bucket, ammonia at 10 ppm. ppm is the same as mg/l so the each litre in the bucket contains 10 mg ammonia.

You want 3 ppm in the volume of tank water. Say you had a 100 litre tank. Each of those 100 litres needs 3 mg ammonia, so you need to add 300 mg ammonia. Each litre in the bucket contains 10 mg ammonia, so you'd need to add 30 litres ie 3 buckets full to the tank (or you'd remove 30 litres water from the tank, then add the 30 litres of ammonia water)

This is why it's easier to use a bottle of ammonia. They are typically 9.5%. Each 100 ml contains 9.5 mg, so 1 litre would contain 95 mg. The hypothetical 100 litre tank would only need 3.16 ml to get 3 ppm.
 

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