Can People Help Me Solve This Mystery?

[Dark Wolf]

Ok so i'm doing a fishless cycle, and my readings are as follows:

Ammonia - 0 (drops from around 4.5 to 0 in 12 hours)
Nitrite - 4ppm
Nitrates - 100+ ppm

Is this good or not? I thought with so much nitrate present and ammonia falling so quickly, surely there shouldn't be any nitrite?

Now the real confusing thing is the fact that i only started this on sunday...

My tank had been on with filter running, and heater on, for around 2 1/2 weeks but i couldn't find any ammonia, so there was nothing going on, so surely nitrite couldn't form with no ammonia source. i had put a small amount of food in the tank for a couple of days (when i'd given up hope of finding ammonia), but then read that doing it like that, made the tank stink, so i stopped. I checked tap water and nitrate is 0, and nitrite is slightly over 0, but not quite 0.1.

Any advice would be very much appreciated

 

[dave_gray2077]

That’s good.

Keep adding Ammonia and once it take 12 hours for both to drop to 0ppm your ready to add fish. You don’t want to starve your bacteria colony. Then a 80%-90% water change to reduce Nitrates and your good to go

The bacterial colony that breaks down Nitrite take a little longer to procreate that’s why you will still have a small reading. You do seem to have cycled fast, did you get some mature filter pads?

I believe Nitrite tests aren’t too accurate with out you calibrating them to known values first. Are you using the strip tests?

In any case you cycling fine.

 

[Dark Wolf]

Nope no mature filter media. Even though, i was using a tank i had previously used, surely the 2/12 weeks of no ammonia would have killed off any bateria that was on there.

And it's the liquid tests that i'm using not strips

 

[orange shark]

its alright for some.......

 

[Dark Wolf]

So i'm guessing people are a little stumped by this?

Ammonia still falling to 0 within 12 hours, nitrites still reading as high (4 and above). Wonder how long this part will take?

 

[danio]

You mentioned dropping some food in. Even though you stopped, there could have been just enough decaying food left in the tank or filter to maintain a small amount of bacteria until you started adding ammonia. That's my guess.

As far as the nitrites, that sounds pretty close to what I saw with the cycle I just finished. It took about a week from the time the ammonia started hitting zero before the nitrites dropped. It was also a planted tank, so nothing ever went off the chart, but the nitrite readings stayed around 3-4 ppm until I saw a 0.25 one night, and then 0 the next morning.