Aquarium Cycling Question

[airbusa1]

It is exactly 2 weeks since strating up my aquarium.
I have been adding fish food every night so the ammonia level was about 0.50 to 1ppm sometimes 0.2ppm5.
I have been testing the water very two days with an api master test kit.
Every two days I have been adding interpet filter start which supposadly adds cultures of the beneficial bacteria every two days which supposadly after 7 doses it cycles the tank in two weeks. I have also been adding Nutrafin cycle bursts randomly in the two weeks.
Yesterday after no nitrite spike (always been 0ppm) there has been a Nitrate spike of about 5-10ppm!
there was a spike erliar from 0-5ppm.
What I need to know is what is happening in my tank?
Is this normal?
I am thinking of adding two fish tommorow to aid the cycle with ammonia levels being 0.25ppm probably less.
I am definatly doing everything right with the testing of the nitrite and nitrate deffinitly!(checked it a lot and lot of times)

 

[Ryefish]

did you test your tap water before adding it to your tank? the Nitrates could naturally be in the water

 

[Harlequins]

Ideally your ammonia and nitrite should be zero before adding any fish or you'll be in a fish in cycle,with lots of water changes...

Ideally you would be better off dosing the tank with ammonia,you can regulate this better than adding fish food,this can be a slow process on building up the good bacteria you filter needs to accomodate fish safely.

Bottled bacteria is a bit hit & miss,not necessarily a good thing,but with no nitrite showing but having nitrate its possible something may be working or you may have nitrate in your tap...

I'm sure someone will be along to give you more info

 

[airbusa1]

I tested my tap water and it has no nitrate.
thank you

 

[waterdrop]

Its important to understand that today's society finds it nearly impossible to imagine that there's anything left out there in the world that they can't just buy and have immediately. We've long ago become out of touch with nature's time cycles. So there's a whole industry built up to try and handle our impatience. The TF retail business needs most of all to try and bring in new customers that will become hobbyists, stick around and continue to need fish, plants and supplies. The statistics are not in favor of the business if the customer gets any inkling of how long it really takes to prepare an actual functioning healthy environment before the fish go in. The average customer will flee in horror!

The answer has been clever, from a marketing point of view. You just turn the story around with what's basically a bald lie. You fill up little bottles with mud or waste and sell them as bacteria starter! The customer doesn't really understand the whole thing to begin with so it at least sounds good. At its best you have the "perfect cycle" (in a completely different sense of the word) where you make some money on the bottles, which makes the customer feel like they're doing something right. Then they get the fish and the fish die, so you get the sale of a second set of fish and possibly even a third set before the tank finally stumbles its way to being cycled.

What you've got going chemically is that the fishfood organics are being slowly broken down into ammonia by the heterotrophs and the bottled starters are basically adding more of the same organics (dead cells and other organic material.) Your fishless cycle is proceeding normally (it normally can take anywhere from one to three weeks for the first ammonia dosing to start noticably dropping in any fishless cycle) but you think its not because of reading the optimistic claims on the bottles or listening to the LFS. Unless you have big additions of live bacterial colonies that you get from another filter, another hobbyist or a LFS, a fishless cycle will nearly always take between one and two months or a little over, because the two correct species of autotrophic bacteria just take that long to grow!

You're doing great though! You've not put any fish in there yet and that means no dead fish and no fish with shortened lives from ammonia gill damage or nitrite nerve damage. A couple of months of testing and learning just amounts to nothing compared to the years of pleasure you're going to be getting from interacting with all the great hobbyists here and having a true working biofilter prepared before you get fish! Its so much easier not having to worry about the fish yet and having time to work on a really good stocking plan! You've started out well with your fish food (its true that household ammonia would be easier and more controlled but fishfood is not a bad first starter if you didn't know this) and propabably the next good piece of information is just hearing the timeline a little better from us.

How about your pH and temperature? The members can help you to understand optimal values for that too.

~~waterdrop~~