Fishless Cycling Issue

[milindsaraswala]

Hellow I have setup my 8 gallon aquarium from last 3 days and today is my 4th day I have I have fill my tank with water without fish and keep air filter, heater to 85 F and air bubble. I have added ammonia on the first day and my reading on first day was 4 ppm. And when i check my ammonia again on 3rd day still it is showing same.

So I wanted to know why ammonia level is not getting down is there any problem. Can somebody advice me ??

 

[waterdrop]

Hi there!

This is totally normal. It can take many days or weeks before the very first 4ppm of ammonia starts to go down. Usually it will finally drop to zero ppm sometime within the first two weeks, but we see a number of cases where it takes 3 weeks and maybe once we saw a whole month. After it goes down to zero, it is usually much faster to get to zero the next time and quickly is going from 4ppm to zero ppm on a daily basis. Around the time that starts happening you can start testing for nitrite(NO2) as we usually start seeing traces of it by then.

~~waterdrop~~