Confused With Cycling

[chemflex]

Morning all. Well as some of you know I already have 3 tanks (discus community, general tropical community and cichlid community).

My cichids are starting to become too large for their tank so we purchased a new tank for them 2 weeks ago - this was always the plan.

The tank is an amazon 240 litre tank and the filter is an Aquaone CF1000. We had added some of the existing water from the cichlid community tank to th new tank - our water is purely RO water so their is no dechlorinator in it.

Strange thing is the tank has been tested daily since the beginning of cycling and no ammonia has every been present. From day one until today the ammonia reading has always been 0, but the nitrite has constanly been at 0.25ppm (has never increased or decreased). At last reading the nitrate level was 40ppm but I have not tested it today. The pH, KH and GH are absolutely spot on.

Any ideas as to why no ammonia has ever been present or why the nitrite isn't decreasing?

 

[Miss Wiggle]

if you've not added any ammonia or fish to the tank then it hasn't started cycling so not bacteria will have developed.

there was probably some nitrite in the water when you added it to the tank and because the filter isn't cycled it's not gone anywhere.

if you just hook your existing filter for the cichilds up to the tank (either in addition to or instead of the filter on there now) you can move the fish over straight away, they filter can support the existing bio load so it'll be fine on the new tank.

 

[chemflex]

If I move my existing filter (Fluval 205 external canister filter) over to the other tank today and move my fish over today. How long is it likely to be until the Fluval can be removed, leaving the Aquaone by itself?

 

[Miss Wiggle]

longer you can leave it on the better, give it at least 2 weeks.

other alternative is to just take the media from the existing fluval and put it all in the aquaone and transfer the fish over