Hi snipesxxx,
You should definately continue your ammonia dosing in the same pattern you had been doing it prior to the water change. The water change, of course, is just one more thing that complicates how to interpret your readings, so you want to continue to dose at the 24 hour mark and then test at 12 and 24 hours after that as usual so that a valid pattern emerges. I think you will find that your A-Bacs and N-Bacs will be back to performing good drops as it sounds like you are getting really far along in your fishless cycle. It sounded from your post like you had lessened your dosing to 2-3ppm during the nitrite spike phase and were starting to ease it back up to 5ppm dosing for the end, right? That's an excellent way and I think you should probably be at 3-4ppm dosing right now, heading toward 5ppm.
[Just a side note here to you and any other curious readers: this "varible dosing" where you drop down to 2-3ppm during the nitrite spike rather than just plugging along always at 5ppm during the entire fishless cycle, is just an "optional fine tuning" type of thing, we hope it makes things a little faster but there is absolutely nothing wrong with just plugging along at 5ppm the whole way and there is no speed-up really proven really, from this fine-tuning thing, just a hunch on the part of some of us. The down side of it is that it confuses the heck out of some readers, lol.]
snipes, you make a valid criticism of our communication of the overall fishless cycling process/instructions I think. I sometimes daydream that the ideal forum software for TFF (or some future software for -any- web forum) would contain a "wiki" component for handling a subset of "collective knowledge of the forum" articles, ideally a few for each subforum of TFF. Basically, I'd picture that as an enhancement of the "pinned article" approach. Pinned articles are far from ideal as "collective knowledge devices" because the followup posts can be confusing to beginners, the pinned article only has one author and certainly there are many more criticisms one could make. I imagine (in my daydream) that a "wikipedia page" is a more ideal device, but I'm not a "wiki software" expert, so I'm not sure.
Now, to continue with this "wiki/pinned" criticism topic, I'd like to say that its an imperfect world out there and hobbyists have to take what they can get. The most important thing about TFF is that we've got a great bunch of members who have together seemingly been able to be relaxed, helpful and conversational in a friendly way, which is not always the case out there. TFF somehow manages to keep the subject centered on the hobby and on sharing... "playing well with others" as we learned in kindergarden I guess, lol. Oh well, sorry to go so far off topic with my daydream thing but I guess another thing I want to say is that our working document from RDD is really masterful in being a compromise between not having enough info versus being too technical to hold a beginner's attention. So there is valid reason to be very reluctant to make changes for the most part I'd say. Over time I've become quite used to the give and take, dialog, method of imparting all the details. It does, though, have its faults, as you validly point out I believe.
(gee, I think its a good time to "go to lunch"
)
~~waterdrop~~
