Fishless Cycling - How long did yours take ?

[Vivienne]

Four weeks into my fishless cycle and we're getting really, really bored and fed up looking at an empty tank. (I actually thought it had been longer, but it was four weeks ago this weekend when I checked the calendar.)

I kept the Ammonia level about 5ppm until it started to vanish overnight - that took about a fortnight. Now I'm dosing with half the level of ammonia every day. I guess I'll have about another 2 weeks to go until it's finished. Testing every morning, but always the same - no ammonia but nitrite is off the chart. We've got a new expression in the house, instead of "When pigs fly" it's "When we get fish in the tank".

So tell me, how long did your tank take ?

 

[Tropjunky]

it too less then a week mabe ur doing it wrong i jus left the tank wit treated tap water in it and tested the water at the end of the week i think u should do a 90% waterchange and then add treated tapwater and then about 6 fishes (small fishies), wait a week and add some more if the watertests checkout ok. It shouldn't take 4 weeks i think its the ammonia ur addin i never put ammonia in my tank.

if it foams up wen u shake the bottle of ammonia then u should clean the tank empty it and then wash the hell outa it cos there's some sort of preservative in there

 

[pseud]

I don't know, I just started cycling my 55 today.
Fishless + Ammonia + Media from my 20 gallon.
Will let you know.

(Although I did add a bit too much ammonia. It's off the chart. Oops. Probably about 8ppm).

My fish cycle took 5 weeks in my 20 gallon.

 

[SirMinion]

it too less then a week mabe ur doing it wrong i jus left the tank wit treated tap water in it and tested the water at the end of the week i think u should do a 90% waterchange and then add treated tapwater and then about 6 fishes (small fishies), wait a week and add some more if the watertests checkout ok. It shouldn't take 4 weeks i think its the ammonia ur addin i never put ammonia in my tank.

[snapback]863735[/snapback]​

Yours wasn't a fishless cycle as you added fish!
No wonder it was faster!

 

[freshcichlid]

im cycling my 40 now and i think i added too much ammonia too, so its taking a long time, been a week now and my ammonia is still high and no sign on nitrites rising

 

[MegTheFish]

My 50 gallon took 7 loooooong painful weeks...but then again, I didn't add any benificial bacteria from my other tanks (which would of helped, a lot!)

 

[modernhamlet]

18 and 21 days for two different tanks...

 

[Tropjunky]

it too less then a week mabe ur doing it wrong i jus left the tank wit treated tap water in it and tested the water at the end of the week i think u should do a 90% waterchange and then add treated tapwater and then about 6 fishes (small fishies), wait a week and add some more if the watertests checkout ok. It shouldn't take 4 weeks i think its the ammonia ur addin i never put ammonia in my tank.

[snapback]863735[/snapback]​

Yours wasn't a fishless cycle as you added fish!
No wonder it was faster!

[snapback]863785[/snapback]​

Well how do u explain the cycle part of it. The tap water has enough waste material to start the cycle and just adding fish isn't too bad if your tank is big enough and you've got a big enough filter.

 

[millym]

ours took approx 2 weeks but i was a bit confused as i got a 0 nititre reading after about 10 days & then got a 0.25 2 days later?? still dont really understand it but its both 0 ammonia & 0 nitrite now has been so for a few days with me adding fishfoodso i guess its fully cycled.... its a little tank ( about 7 us gal) we're going to use for fry when they get too big for the breeder box.

 

[Bignose]

If your tap water has waste, i.e. ammonia in it, you really should notify your landlord/city water board, etc. etc. You should not be drinking ammonia. The cycle starts only when there is a source of ammonia -- an ammonia salt, or liquid ammonia, or even fish food that breaks down in time. Those are the common fishless choices. If you add ammonia because you added fish, then is it clearly not a fishless cycle.

In answer to the post starter. Two tanks, both exactly 35 days -- though I don't really know how they both took the same amount of days as I added liquid ammonia differently in the two tanks.

 

[Briarmoor]

I kept doing so many different things because of huge ammonia readings that I lost track of what really happened or how long it took. I just remember lugging LOTS of buckets.

I would definitely seed any tank I start up from now on. However, seeding with a filter from a smaller tank didn't give me enough bacteria intitially going from the 10g to the 20g and I had small spikes in ammonia, then nitrite (mini cycle). Partial water changes kept that under control and the spikes were so small, the fish probably could have handled it.

I have also tried Cycle and something worked as I didn't have any cycle worth noting starting/restarting my other tanks. For me, I found the ammonia confusing and I am an educated and logical person. My test strips didn't really match the color on the bottle, etc. But many swear by it. I have since graduated to liquid test kit so maybe that would have helped with accuracy.

Oh, I forgot the suspended algae after about a month. That precipitated almost a 100% water change. 55 gallons divided by 2 buckets that hold 2.5 gallons. You do the maths to empty the tank then refill it.

I finally have fish in it and it is looking like a *real* tank. I am just going the route of adding slowly and adding a bit of Cycle as I add fish. Great levels the whole time. Mature tanks are great and I can't wait until I've had them running a couple of years.

P.

 

[Tropjunky]

Cycleing takes too long so the best thing to do is to go to someone with a tank that's established and using some of the filter media from that tank.

 

[Angry_Platy]

no ammonia but nitrite is off the chart

What is your nitrate reading? I had a similar problem when I was fishless cycling one of my tanks. The ammonia would disappear overnight yet the nitrates and nitrites stayed massively high. Someone on here told me that if your nitrites are heaps too high that the cycle can stall. So I lowered them by massive water changes and the cycle was complete after that in about 2 days. I did do goole searches at the same time which confirmed what peeps here said (though I didn't keep the links)....

It is certainly something that needs to be considered.

 

[Vivienne]

Angry Platy - I think that's definitely the case - I actually did as close to a 100% water change as I could get yesterday morning. Nitrite was at least 3.3 (that's as high as the chart gets). This morning it was between 0.8 and 1.6. I didn't test Nitrate today, but before the water change it was off the chart too (> 110). So there's definitely all the right types of bacteria there. (No nitrates at all in the tap water.)

It makes sense. You only need enough Nitrite converting bacteria to convert one days worth of nitrite, not all the backlog that builds up too.

Sounds like we just have to be patient a little while longer - from the limited results so far, 4 weeks doesn't seem abnormally long.

 

[SirMinion]

Well how do u explain the cycle part of it. The tap water has enough waste material to start the cycle and just adding fish isn't too bad if your tank is big enough and you've got a big enough filter.

[snapback]863919[/snapback]​

There was no cycle, adding tap water to a tank then testing it a week later is not a cycle. There will be no ammonia as there's nothing in the tank to make ammonia, and there was no nitrate because there was no ammonia for the ammonia eating bacteria to turn into nitrite.

You added your fish to a settled, but uncycled tank.

If your tapwater contains enough bacteria and ammonia to cycle a tank in a week without adding any additional ammonia, then stop drinking it now and go buy some bottled water.