Fishless Cycle Help

[martin_jones]

Hello.

I started a fishless cycle on my 260L tank on Monday. It has been running for a week with gravel and plants (some from my existing tank) and has an eheim external filter. I bought the tank, gravel and filter 2nd hand so I assumed they had some bacteria in (altho not much as I was told that they'd been switched off for about 1 week).

It took 3 drops of ammonia to put my 10L bucket to 5ppm. I therefore worked out that it would take 78 drops for the tank.

I duly added these Monday evening. I did however to forget the contents of the eheim filter. I didn't check the ammonia after adding it to the tank - I presumed it would be at the correct level.

Upon checking yesterday, it was down to 0.5, and when I checked today, it was at 0.
I then checked the Nitrite and that was 0 too.

Could all the existing filter media, gravel, plants etc have cycled the tank already?

I will add more ammonia today until I can get some fish at the weekend if all appears correct.

Any thoughts?

Martin

 

[geo7x]

hmm, whats odd is that you have no nitrites, you see, the ammonia processing bacteria processes it into nitrite, and then the nitrite porcessing bacteria processes it into nitrate, and nitrate is only removable by water changes. so someone else may be a better input on that, but it definitely seems odd to me. The bacteria would have died off after about 12 hours, or at least started, so i doubt any bacteria were left in your filter . Im afraid that a few days to finish a cycle would be a miracle without mature media, and in your case with the tank having not been run for a week, then i think you are basically starting from scratch, so could be looking at 2-4 weeks before its finished, even more (like me )

 

[martin_jones]

I have been rinsing the filters from my other tank into the water when doing water changes. I was hoping that some of the bacteria would have transferred.