Have I Messed Up My Cycling?

[zesty]

Hi, I have been fishless cycling with some mature media for about 2 weeks now but I had wrongly been adding ammonia every 12 hours.
I stopped doing this 3 days ago by only adding 5ppm ammonia every 24 hours, then testing ammonia every 12 hours it drops to 0.25ppm
When I test nitrites the API test goes purple as soon as I put the drops in so its off the scale.
24 hours ago I did a 30% water change to try and help the nitrites but they are still off the scale.

Should I have done the water change?
Are my nitrites ever going to drop?
Have I ruined my cycle?

Help please

 

[Tw3lv3]

Ive never done a fishless cycle before but if the ammonia was off the chart then i can only think of doing a bigger water change like 50% or something

 

[zesty]

Ive never done a fishless cycle before but if the ammonia was off the chart then i can only think of doing a bigger water change like 50% or something

I only ever topped up the ammonia to 5ppm but instead of doing it every 24hours I was doing it every 12hours, the ammonia readings never went
off the chart.

I did the water change because the nitrites were off the chart and I thought that changing some of the water would help settle the nitrates, rightly or wrongly.

 

[Realtree]

My basic understanding of a fishless cycle is that you don't do any water changes.
It is expected that the nitrites will go off the scale for a period along the way.
My basic understanding is that the ammonia you add is feeding "friendly" bacteria which "eat" the ammonia these in turn create nitrites which in turn is "eaten" by a second "friendly" bacteria which in your case (at the stage you are at) are not present in enough numbers yet to reduce the nitrite level.
Keep adding the ammonia and this feeds this chain reaction.
When both ammonia and nitrite is 0 the cycle is complete.
I don't think you have affected the cycle in anyway by the waterchange as it is only nitrates whic can be removed by a water change which will be present at the end of the cycle and can only be reduced by water changes

Keep at it
Good luck

 

[zesty]

I have read conflicting opinions as to whether to do a water change or not, so I bit the bullet and changed some of it.

I thought I had read that by double dosing the ammonia like I had done then it could mess up the cycle with bad bacteria.

Will see what happens over the next few days.

 

[waterdrop]

No need to worry at all zesty. Wouldn't have mattered either way, whether you changed water or not, given the stage you are at and the slight misunderstanding you had. The excess of nitrites is an excess in either case and will eventually be consumed by the second species (the nitrite oxidizing bacteria, we call them N-Bacs for short but their real name is Nitrospira!) The info Realtree gave you was 99% correct up there. (water changes, of course, remove everthing dissolved or mixed with the water that's removed, including some ammonia and nitrites in addition to nitrates and lots of other stuff (!) so its not just nitrates that can be removed by water changes.)

For the record, there is no "meaning" to a "percentage" change (like the 30% you did) when you are fishless cycling. "Percentage" changes only have meaning in the context of not shocking fish. Bacteria are much more difficult to shock and so there's no reason not to always do a 90% change if you are going to change at all during a fishless cycle, because usually you are doing it to accomplish something (typically, to raise KH and thus pH and/or to lower nitrates and nitrites and/or to refresh the calcium and iron via the fresh tap water.)

Now as a practical matter, one might want to make things easier with a cannister filter by just leaving it running and stopping the water change just prior to uncovering the bottom inlet pipe, that's what I do and its a lot easier.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[zesty]

No need to worry at all zesty. Wouldn't have mattered either way, whether you changed water or not, given the stage you are at and the slight misunderstanding you had. The excess of nitrites is an excess in either case and will eventually be consumed by the second species (the nitrite oxidizing bacteria, we call them N-Bacs for short but their real name is Nitrospira!) The info Realtree gave you was 99% correct up there. (water changes, of course, remove everthing dissolved or mixed with the water that's removed, including some ammonia and nitrites in addition to nitrates and lots of other stuff (!) so its not just nitrates that can be removed by water changes.)

For the record, there is no "meaning" to a "percentage" change (like the 30% you did) when you are fishless cycling. "Percentage" changes only have meaning in the context of not shocking fish. Bacteria are much more difficult to shock and so there's no reason not to always do a 90% change if you are going to change at all during a fishless cycle, because usually you are doing it to accomplish something (typically, to raise KH and thus pH and/or to lower nitrates and nitrites and/or to refresh the calcium and iron via the fresh tap water.)

Now as a practical matter, one might want to make things easier with a cannister filter by just leaving it running and stopping the water change just prior to uncovering the bottom inlet pipe, that's what I do and its a lot easier.

~~waterdrop~~

Ok, thanks for that.
Would there be any benefit in me doing another water change say 90% this time, or should I just leave it alone?

 

[MaxPower]

I did exactly the same thing with my cycle, I rode the storm and the nitrites did eventually come down all of a sudden.

 

[zesty]

I did exactly the same thing with my cycle, I rode the storm and the nitrites did eventually come down all of a sudden.

Thats what I was thinking of doing, its just with my over dosing of ammonia I wondered if a water change would be beneficial at all.

Did you make the same mistake as me with your ammonia?

 

[Rediahs]

In my fishless cycle, my nitrites spiked off the chart and stayed there for awhile... someone suggested that if you do a water change to bring the nitrites back down they will start to act better... and it seemed to work because once I did that, they were completely processing in 24 hours (not 12 hours yet, a week or two later I had it in 12 hours!!)

No reason not to do the water change other than you don't want to go to the bother... but I would do it... it's much nicer to be able to see what's going on instead of just waiting on nitrites that are off the scale for a long time.

 

[zesty]

In my fishless cycle, my nitrites spiked off the chart and stayed there for awhile... someone suggested that if you do a water change to bring the nitrites back down they will start to act better... and it seemed to work because once I did that, they were completely processing in 24 hours (not 12 hours yet, a week or two later I had it in 12 hours!!)

No reason not to do the water change other than you don't want to go to the bother... but I would do it... it's much nicer to be able to see what's going on instead of just waiting on nitrites that are off the scale for a long time.

Good, you have convinced me to do a water change tonight. I have it easy when doing water changes, I bought a 1750lph pump and I just connect up a hose and stick it out the back door. I can empty the tank quicker than I can fill it using a hosepipe, my tank is 80g so it would be a nightmare using buckets.

Thanks

 

[MaxPower]

In my fishless cycle, my nitrites spiked off the chart and stayed there for awhile... someone suggested that if you do a water change to bring the nitrites back down they will start to act better... and it seemed to work because once I did that, they were completely processing in 24 hours (not 12 hours yet, a week or two later I had it in 12 hours!!)

No reason not to do the water change other than you don't want to go to the bother... but I would do it... it's much nicer to be able to see what's going on instead of just waiting on nitrites that are off the scale for a long time.

Good, you have convinced me to do a water change tonight. I have it easy when doing water changes, I bought a 1750lph pump and I just connect up a hose and stick it out the back door. I can empty the tank quicker than I can fill it using a hosepipe, my tank is 80g so it would be a nightmare using buckets.

Thanks

Yes I did overdose my ammonia like you

If its a simple water change as previously said then there is no reason not to. Mine is a 10 bucket up and down stairs jobby so not much fun thats why waited with mine.

 

[zesty]

In my fishless cycle, my nitrites spiked off the chart and stayed there for awhile... someone suggested that if you do a water change to bring the nitrites back down they will start to act better... and it seemed to work because once I did that, they were completely processing in 24 hours (not 12 hours yet, a week or two later I had it in 12 hours!!)

No reason not to do the water change other than you don't want to go to the bother... but I would do it... it's much nicer to be able to see what's going on instead of just waiting on nitrites that are off the scale for a long time.

Good, you have convinced me to do a water change tonight. I have it easy when doing water changes, I bought a 1750lph pump and I just connect up a hose and stick it out the back door. I can empty the tank quicker than I can fill it using a hosepipe, my tank is 80g so it would be a nightmare using buckets.

Thanks

Yes I did overdose my ammonia like you

If its a simple water change as previously said then there is no reason not to. Mine is a 10 bucket up and down stairs jobby so not much fun thats why waited with mine.

Yeah water change couldnt be any easier, took me about 10 minutes or so to pump out about 70 gallons and about 30 minutes to fill it back up with the hose. I had nearly finished filling it when I suddenly realised I had forgot to dechlorinate the water.

Did a quick nitrite test a little while ago and for the first time the test didnt go purple in the bottom of the tube instantly, after 5 minutes though it was showing as 5ppm but at least I have now been able to measure the nitrites now.

Now I am not overdosing the ammonia my tank clears 5ppm ammonia within 12 hours so things are starting to look a bit more positive now, just got to wait on them nitrites to get their act together.

 

[zesty]

Well I tested everything this morning and -

ammonia - 0
nitrite - 0
nitrate - 80
ph - 7.6

Topped ammonia back up to 5ppm. I know that it will be back to 0ppm within 12 hours but fingers crossed my nitrites will do the same.

Things are finally starting to look better now I think.

 

[OldMan47]

It is not unusual to see a good response of nitrites after a big mid-cycle water change. I wish I knew if that was because the high nitrites were somehow impacting the ability of the nitrospira to grow their colony or if it was just our ability to monitor that is affected. Face it, if you have nitrites at 150 ppm and can get it down, 2 things happen. First is that you can measure the nitrites and you may have been removing 10 ppm every day and now that levels are below 10 ppm, it suddenly looks like the bacteria have had a population explosion. The other thing that could be happening is that the nitrite processors are really being inhibited by the high concentration and by reducing it you have freed them to reproduce. I really wish I knew which answer is correct but I am not ready to put myself through a fresh fishless cycle on 2 experimental tanks just to find out.