Day 18 Fishless Cycle Are These Weird Results?

[Bugsvile]

Ok so i have been monitoring my water condition since the 26th of August, since then i have seen no change

Ph is at a constant 8.2

Ammonia is at 5ppm

Nitrite is 0ppm

Nitrate is at 10-15ppm

Why are these not changing at all?

I have checked my media just in case like the wife she had a plastic bag wrapping her media up, no plastic,

Filters are working fine,

No plant life.

no fish. i am confused please can someone help me!

 

[Bugsvile]

One thing i have just noticed as i am getting frustrated with the no change, i just checked on my sponge filter, there were 2 black bugs with rounded bodies apparently eating whatever off of my sponge, were they eating the good bacteria maybe?

They were only small things around the size of i would guess 2mm.

any idea? i did have some plants in there previousley but thought it might mess up the fishless cycle and took them out.

 

[OldMan47]

Your bugs may have come in on the plants. I would remove them just to be certain they were not affecting anything.
It has been a long time for the cycle to start. Can you get your wife to clean her filter in your tank to get a starter of bacteria from her filter? I find a trick like that can often shorten my own filter cycles to less than a week.

 

[waterdrop]

Well, your ammonia is for real, right? If you wave a whiff in the direction of your nose (careful!) if just about knocks you out, right? And the tap water tested maybe zero ammonia and then you worked it out and got the tank concentration to 4 or 5ppm and that test result looked totally different than the tap water, right?

Your pH looks good and I assume you are at about 29C/84F for cycling and you've got plenty of good sponges in there for biomedia and have good water flow, right? That pH should be dead on perfect for fast cycling.

So it sounds like you just may have a tap water system that doesn't have too many of the chlorine/chloramine resistant versions of our beneficial bacteria (which is what we take advantage of to start out tanks!) There's always a few in there, so it just means you are having to wait for these very few to go through their slow muliplications to start to be seen by our crude test kits.

You are not quite at 3 weeks since start of dosing and we do have a number of cases like that every now and then, so its not an indication of an unknown problem quite yet!

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Bugsvile]

Cheers for the responses,

With regards to temp it is at 29C, loads of different layers of sponges, inclusing some carbon, water flow is absolutley great, its running on high speed, maybe i should slow it down i dont know?

As you said, zero ammonia in the tape water when tested so no problem there, i guess i will try what Oldman47 said, with regards to that does that mean squeezing out fish crap and all into my tank?

Maybe i'm dumb or just eager but i just went out and purchased the Roma 200 to sit next to me in the lounge while on my laptop. Thought i had checked it thoroughly for any visible cracks ,which were not there but just found the cross piece was broken so i got to wait now to take it back

 

[darenshan54]

i started my cycle on august 25th and my ammonia wont go to zero, always at 0.25-0.5ppm (nitrite 0 as well). But im cycling with fish and plants