Fishless Cycle Done?

[stanicol]

Hi all, I have been doing a fishless cycle with a juwel rio 300 tank, for the last 2 days the ammonia and nitrite readings after 24hrs have both been 0 (I have been topping up to 3ppm since nitrite spiked)

I have a few things I am not 100% sure of...

How much of the water should I now change? (nitrate at between 40-80ppm)
After I do the big water change, should I add fish straight away or do I add ammonia up to 3ppm and leave for 24hrs to ensure all is well?
How long do I leave the water after I put in the conditioner (API Stress Coat) before I can add it to the tank?
Anyone got any tips for making the water change less labour intensive ;-)

Thanks for the help so far!
Stan

 

[Tropicoll]

Hi - Welcome to the forum!

I am going through a fishless cycle too and the instructions I am following (from the pinned topic at the top of the newbie forum) suggest that we should be testing the water after 12 hours to ensure that all the ammonia and nitrites are being processed in the 12 hours. The ABacs and NBacs should be tested for about a week before worrying too much about changing water (so I am told!)

Are you testing for pH?

I am not certain of the API Stress Coat - are you using this to dechlorinate the water?

 

[stanicol]

Hi - Welcome to the forum!

I am going through a fishless cycle too and the instructions I am following (from the pinned topic at the top of the newbie forum) suggest that we should be testing the water after 12 hours to ensure that all the ammonia and nitrites are being processed in the 12 hours. The ABacs and NBacs should be tested for about a week before worrying too much about changing water (so I am told!)

Are you testing for pH?

I am not certain of the API Stress Coat - are you using this to dechlorinate the water?

Thanks

Yes I am using the Stress Coat to dechlorinate the tap water.

I will test the ammonia and nitrites tomorrow morning (12hrs after topping up to 3ppm) and if they are not at 0 I will probably keep the cycle going a bit before adding the fish.

I am testing the pH daily as I had a bit of a crash about 10 days ago due to very low kH (less than 17.9ppm in the tank using API test) I dont know why the kH dropped, our tap kH is about 71.6ppm but I increased it to about 89.5 using baking soda to buffer the pH level and it has been very steady at about 7.6 ever since.

 

[waterdrop]

Your tap water had a KH=4 (in german degrees, which is how we usually state, if I recall the conversion correctly), which is not very high. The cycling process will easily use up this buffer, dropping you to KH=1 or so and subsequently causing a pH crash. Once the pH gets down to 6.2 the cycling process will stop. Common practice, assuming we're talking fishless here, is to buffer the tank with baking soda, usually after some back and forth with members to be sure you understand about it.

API Stress Coat is a perfectly fine conditioner for removing chlorine or chloramine from your tap water, regardless of which bacterial killer your water authority uses. Addition of conditioner to tap water causes an instant reaction once the conditioner swirls into the tap water and there need be no waiting for it to do anything further. You will see numerous discussions on TFF about the preference for a Seachem product called Prime, which is considered to be about the top choice of conditioner because it is more concentrated and therefor costs less in the long run, besides having excellent side benefits in the way it deals with ammonia and heavy metals. Even beyond that recommendation, the crowd has moved on to finding that dechlor bottled for ponds is even cheaper and so that is the most current preference for cheapest.

You are probably not meeting the standards to "start your filter qualifying week" as you are only feeding at 3ppm and it will need to ease up to 5ppm to make the bacterial colonies robust enough for the start of fish period. The drops from 5ppm to zero ppm for both ammonia and nitrite will have to be occurring within 12 hours or less after the ammonia add during the whole qualifying week.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[rabbut]

Once the filter is dropping 5ppm of ammonia in 12 hours, you are rady to start the "proving period" for your filter.

Once ready to prove the filter, do as large as possible (as close to 100% as practicle) waterchange, and run the tank for a week, adding ammonia to 5ppm daily as before, and checking all ammonia and nitrite drops to zero in 12 hours as before. The reason for this is that a tank will often suffer a "blip" in the first week, and it is better to undergo a mini-cycle without fish in the tank, that it is with fish in. If fish are in the tank when a mini-cycle occurs, you need to often do immediate 50% waterchanges, often for a couple of days, to remady the issue of ammonia and nitrite spikes before they poison the fish with no fish in, you can let the tank be to sort itself out...

I have a 335l tank, and also found waterchanges a bind with buckets, so I can sympathise with you there. Rest assured, there is an easier way

Hose pipe

Use it to drain and fill, and gravity and mains water pressure does all the hard work for you A normal 20% waterchange can only drop the temperature by about 5oC if the replacement water hits the tank at 0c, when in reality it will never do that. I do by-weekly 50%'s with a hose on my tank with Discus, without issues I am currently experimenting without dechlorinator, though this method is not the recomended one I should advise you to add a double does of dechlorinator for the water going in, before you start filling Dechlorinator works almost instantly, so chlorine and chloramine poisoning are nothing to worry about with this method

HTH
Rabbut