I'm Going Away - What Will Become Of My Fishless Cycle?

[nehpets81]

Well, I'm on day 80 or something of my fishless cycle and the Ammonia in my tank is being processed in about 36 hours from 4ppm. The Nitrite processing is keeping up, never going above 1ppm. Recently the PH has reduced from 8.3 to about 7.6 twice (the first time I did a water change, this time I have purchased some bicarb and I'm about to look up what to do with that!)
Anyhow, my problem is that I'm going away for 6 days soon. What will become of my bacteria? Will they starve to death? Is there anything I can do to keep them fed? If the PH reduces much more, will this slow the processing of ammonia and if so, is this something I can use to my advantage in this case or could it completely stall my cycle?

So many questions...

 

[Tizer]

nobody around to dose it up a little if needed?

 

[nehpets81]

Nope not really, I could try explaining the whole thing to my neighbours but none of them have English as their first language and it might get a bit tricky explaining it all to them...

 

[Tizer]

any form of automated feeding machine that you could put in the top that would dispence liquid could work for a few days, a dose of ammonia every few days should be enough i would imagine.

 

[nehpets81]

Ah, good idea - I'll have a look for something like that.

 

[waterdrop]

Hi nehpets81,

If worse comes to worse you could do a big pinch or two of flake food in the tank as you leave and hopefully find it stinking a bit but alive and well and even advanced some. You could also do a couple of prawns/shrimp in a mesh bag in the tank to similar effect.

However, it may be worth it to at least make an attempt at a better plan. I would be working on two aspects: figuring out what sort of little containers you could use to store a "dose" (a little one-day dose) that would be marked for each day (or every other day just to keep things alive) of ammonia. The other aspect would be to work on the people angle - some people may be better than others for this sort of thing, regardless of language. Somebody who you trust, who likes you, who is smart.. all sorts of obvious aspects to this to weigh. A human being looking in is a very valuable thing.

If it were only a weekend I would say to forget it and they would just survive ok but 6 days is just getting long enough that it would be nice for a dosing or two at least. Or of course a nice set of six letter sized pages with the weekday names in their language and a little bottle of the ammonia dose taped to each one.. big and obvious and then a relaxed talk session with you that doesn't come at the last minute when you have to get to the airport!

~~waterdrop~~