Cycling With Flakes?

[divegirl]

Hi, I'm new to the forum....but not a total newbie to fish keeping. My 12 year old daughter and I are in the process of setting up a 30l Betta tank.....using flakes to cycle[this is the point I get out of my depth....so to speak!]. My daughter is doing most of it herself....hence no ammonia, and I am unsure how to tell when the cycle is finished

She started the tank almost two weeks ago using mature filter media from my well established tank [my tank being under-stocked and with water perams of nitrite:0 amm:0 nitrate: 0.25-0], her readings have been stable for 3 days now [nitrite:0 amm:0 nitrate:5 [just added plants]]. She had a spike on about day 7, amm and nitrite reading 4 and 3 respectively.......and has continued to add flake.......

Where do we go from here

Many thanks

Lisa x

ps.....Excellent site btw

 

[arobinson1984]

Personally I wouldn't recommend cycling with flakes, simply for the reason that its all abit too much guesswork and not as accurate if your were adding say x amount of ammonia.

Have a quick read of these two links, they will help you

Nitrogen cycle

Fishless cycling

You will need to basically follow the fishless cycling guide but where it mentions ammonia, substitute that with adding flakes, so you need to know a rough idea of how much ammonia is produced when you put in a certain amount of flakes.

A cycle is finished when 5ppm of ammonia can be changed to nitrIte and then into nitrAte all within 12 hours, and can constantly do this within 12 hours for a week.

Hope this helps a little, anymore questions just ask, there are alot of friendly people on here willing to help and although I'd not recommend cycling using flakes, at least you aren;t using fish so thats a big

Andy

 

[divegirl]

Thanks for that!!! Did think that cycling with flake sounded a bit hit and miss.....
Assuming she is partly there.....would it be ok just to swap over to ammonia?

Lisa x

 

[arobinson1984]

Yes it would be fine, but I'd advise you do it rather than your little girl lol.

You'd need pure ammonia, that doesnt have any scent and when it is shaken, it shouldnt foam on the top. Mostly available from boots or homebase if you are in the UK. Boots staff tend to not even know they sell it! It's located with the cleaning products but I think its only the larger stores that stock it.

If you're going to change to using ammonia, you'd be best doing a large water change to get your current levels right down in the tank to make it easier to judge and monitor from there on. If you look at the top of the page, there is a link for aquarium calculator. You can use that to work out the rough amount you would need to add each time.

Andy