I'm just mentioning it for the sake of helping you establish the habit, not because its any particular problem at this stage of fishless cycling by any means. The process could probably be compared to a lot of other practical biological or chemical processes or perhaps to a lot of things a good cook would learn: there are lots of aspects of it that are not critical but a few key ones that you want to learn to keep your eye on.
So, for instance, we like to start out making sure there's a good dose of ammonia there, like 3,4 or 5ppm or so but the only aspects of that that seem to matter are that we -not- have the concentration up at 7 or 8ppm (because that promotes a different species of bacteria than we want) and that we not down around trace, 1 or maybe 2ppm (because we're not sure if that might just allow it to slip to zero when we're not looking a slow our overall progress a little.)
We like to keep a nice warm temp (my favorite is 84F/29C, as written up in one of the other nearby threads I think but there's not much good data on specific temp numbers other than it obviously being warmer than a normal tropical tank.) We like to know where we stand relative to the ideal 8.0 to 8.4 pH even though we may no do anything to change pH unless some other things arise, as you know from your pretty extreme experience already with the soft scottish water.
We like to do things that help to control the overall nitrogen in the tank. Once the cycling process really gets underway we will be adding a lot of nitrogen on often a daily basis when we add ammonia (NH3) and of course the overall N amount will keep getting larger, whether its in the form of NH3, NO2 or NO3. So when the first phase is ending and the second phase is beginning (when ammonia is rapidly dropping each day and nitrite (NO2) is starting to spike as high as its test can show, we can drop back on the ammonia concentration from 5ppm to about 3ppm, to the extent we can detect this difference in our color matching when we do the test. This will be fine to string the A-Bacs along and of course the N-Bacs have got way more than enough to keep them busy but it will slightly lessen the overall N going in. Then when we move to the third phase (signified by the nitrite spike being over) we can ease the ammonia dosing concentration back up to 5ppm. We'll very definately want it up at 5ppm for the finish of the process where we qualify the biofilter.
The reason for sounding kind of regimented about the "add-hour" 24hour and 12 hour testing is not so much that the process needs it but that it really helps to allow your testing to make more sense when you are trying to interpret it. If you think in terms of a graph, you are creating little humps that change with time and you are then trying to "snapshop" them to learn something both about amount and about time and if the beginning is irregular then it confuses the issue.
~~waterdrop~~ (when my coffee's too hot I type a lot to get it to cool down
)