Cycling New Tank With Mature Media Donation

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Yes, OM47 has related many times his fairly reliable success at getting a mature media clone to come back to life and cycle its new tank within a week. He doses the tank at 5ppm just as a normal fishless cycle and then CLEANS the rest of the old filter directly in the new tank to let it suck up even more debris that has bacteria on it and he reports that it often can then pass the fishless cycling test in about a week. This has been reported by plenty of others too, not just OM47.

Note that its different, in a somewhat subtle way, from simply moving a filter along with its matching bioload of fish from one tank to another. In the filter move case, the media stays in the filter and is not disturbed and the bioload is an exact match. That scenerio is just less stress on the bacteria and their biofilm structures.

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[OldMan47]

Almost right WD. I clean my used filter before adding any ammonia. There is no need to get traces of ammonia back into my original tank. So far the method has been surprisingly reliable given all of the variables involved. I figure I am doing much what was done in the old days with a brand new fresh bottle of Biospira.

 

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Aah! I hadn't thought of that OM, of course! There's no need for there to be ammonia already in the tank where the sponges are going to be squeezed out, they would just carry some ammonia back to the donating tank. Thanks for sharing that detail. WD