Hello New Here I Am 3/4's Into My Fishless Cycle

I'd get the result checked by your lfs. The tests could be inaccurate, or you could be Reading that one wrong or any number of things. If it's actually been zero this whole time then you may have starved the bacteria.

Is it possible you're not Reading the result right?
 
hi there

Again i will say im no expert but this is what i would do to try and get it moving.....

If you get the same result tomorrow do a 90% water change, thats empty all the water all the way down to the gravel/substrate, now refill and try to get the water you put back into your tank as near to 84 as possible, (remembering that around 84 is best for growing the good bacteria) then add the right amount of ammonia to take the ammonia in your tank to 4ppm. Test it about 40 minutes later to check that the ammonia is showing ok at around 4ppm. Now leave it to 8pm (24hours) the following day and do your normal tests.

This is what i would do, others on here may have a much better idea to get your cycle moving again.

Danny
 
if your tests have read 0.25 for 4 days i think its more likely to have been 0 the whole time as it would have evapourated over that time all you have been doing for the last 4 days is starving the bacteria i would suggest you add around 6ml of ammonia then test your ammonia levels then in 2-3 hours test for nitrite and nitrate if you have nitrite and nitrate in 2-3 hours you know your bacteria is alive and cycling then you just need to monitor the time it takes for the ammonia and nitrate to drop to 0
dont change any water yet you dont need too untill your sure your cycle is finished

im afraid whoever told you to leave it 4 days without ammonia has been feeding you bum info
 
It may be that we have a problem in the interpretation of the ammonia test result here. We have seen cases where people were using CFL (compact fluorescent lighting - those thinner fluorescent tubes all curled up to fit in a regular lightbulb socket... or similar) that had a greenish cast to the light and it caused them to interpret something as 0.25ppm that others would have just called as yellow and therefor zero ppm. OR, in some cases people just call a darker yellow as 0.25ppm.

In any case, we do want to get suspicious if the ammonia makes a fairly substantial drop from 4 or 5ppm all the way down to some small or trace amount, like 0.25 or lower, and then just seems to stick there, as it could easily just be an interpretation problem.

Different bits of all the advice here are correct. Technically, in an Add & Wait fishless cycle you do indeed want to wait for ammonia to come all the way down to zero and then re-dose ammonia on the add-hour, thus sometimes producing the "pulsing" effect where the bacteria may see zero ammonia for some part of a day. But on the other hand, we don't want an incorrect interpretation of "what constitutes zero" to starve the bacteria for days.

One thing we can do in this particular case is to go ahead and re-dose and then observe how quickly the ammonia drops while its at the initial higher concentrations after dosing. The quicker that drop is, the more we'd be suspicious that the sticking at 0.25 is a bit of an anomaly. It could be that the testing tube wasn't completely clean from previous tests (a distilled water rinse can help with testtube cleaning.) Or it could just be light, as mentioned.

~~waterdrop~~
 
it just doesnt look yellow on the api result card it looks like a 0.25 but i am going to add 6ml of ammonia now, and i rinse all the tubes, also my plants seem to be goin brown or different colour from green they are new plants why would this happen? just going to add 6ml of ammonia now brb

added the ammonia will do a test at about 5
 
Any number of reasons from not getting enough light, to not getting enough nutrients or even the possibility they are losing their leaves from growing outside water to get their submerged leaves.
 
Any number of reasons from not getting enough light, to not getting enough nutrients or even the possibility they are losing their leaves from growing outside water to get their submerged leaves.
could be the light the small ones on the sides cant be growing out the water i am going to turn the light on now
 
ph 7.6 ( possibly more but it only goes up to 7.6 )
amm between 2 and 4 ( dark green but not the darkest )
nrite 0
nrate 5

what to do now? or from now on?
 

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