Fishless Cycle Going Wrong

[ShinySideUp]

My fishless cycle is going well as ammonia and nitrites are going in about twenty hours.

However...

1) My pH keeps falling to less than 6.5 despite regular water changes and re-dosing.

and

2) I am getting this white stuff growing on the rubber suckers that hold my filter pipes on.

What's going wrong?

 

[4seasons]

I am guessing you have soft water is why your PH is falling. Have you checked you hardness? Do you add baking soda to get the PH up? What is the PH of you tap water?

 

[fluttermoth]

The white stuff is some sort of algae that likes to grow on new suckers. It'll go soon enough; probably not before it's broken up and is floating in bits around your tank like used toilet paper though

We have such soft water down here that pH drops are almost inevitable. You might need to buffer it while you're cycling.

 

[ShinySideUp]

Oh yes, I'd forgotten about the softness of the water. I'm beginning to feel less like a fish keeper and more like a chemical engineer .

 

[phoenixgsd]

our water is bearly 6.2 here and after 5months i gave up on a fishless cycle, it was more hard work and stressfull than the fish in one i was doing

 

[ShinySideUp]

I am guessing you have soft water is why your PH is falling. Have you checked you hardness? Do you add baking soda to get the PH up? What is the PH of you tap water?

Well that was easy. Mixed a dessertspoonful of bicrbonate of soda into a litre of water and poured it in to the tank. Waited ten minutes for it to mix and checked pH again and it has gone from 6 or 6.5 up to 7.5 so that's saved me a ton of water.

I wonder if I could use a smaller amount to raise the pH a tiny bit in my other tank -- the one with fish in it -- so that the filter bacteria would work more efficiently. I'd be a little more wary there as apart from raising the pH I'd be concerned what else bicarb would do to the water?