Well I tried this and the fish died within a couple hours and I don't know why... Then after being assured by a knowledgable fish seller that the new fish I bought would be ok it happened again this time quicker. Any ideas?
Hi there. Its hard to tell what might have been wrong without collecting a lot of information from you. I notice you had a thread in the "Your New Freshwater Tank" section and I guess you could add on to that if you really wanted to get into it and try to figure out what went wrong, or you could start a new topic on the subject.
Personally, I think of most Fish-In Cycling as a kind of urgent "patch" for a situation where a beginner just wasn't familiar with how to prepare a real "biofilter" before exposing the fish to the unfiltered water. That's probably because I hang out so much in the beginner section that I get a biased number of cases like that. If one performs a "planned" Fish-In cycle, there a greater likelihood the fish can live through it and perhaps not sustain as much damage to their gills and nerves (which unfortunately is more or less invisible to us, so we don't really know when this is happening to them via seeing symptoms or such.) In a "planned" Fish-In, you try to have few enough fish that the water changing will be easier, making it less likely that you'll slip up and have the poisons go above 0.25ppm.
Does that make sense?
~~waterdrop~~