Your results prove to me what I was going to post, that as far as I am concerned API's bacterial starter is a waste one's money. If it was a viable bacterial starter it would contain at least two thing ammonia oxidizers and nitrite oxidizers. That means nitrites should not go off the scale any more than ammonia should. If you really want a working starter try DrTims One and Only or Tetra's Safe Start.
My guess is the transfer process you followed may have had a temporary effect. The ammonia oxidizing bacteria that process decently at a pH of 6.0 will not be so happy being dumped into 7.0. Moreover, ammonia at 6.0 pHl is virtually non-toxic. (on the API kit).
Do not dose any more ammonia- at 6.0 (on the API kit) its a problem- you are almost at the point of stalling your cycle. Do an immediate water change and get your ammonia level down. This will also lower your nitrite levels. Then do not dose any more ammonia until there is 0. At that point you can feed ammonia every few days and then only to between 2 and 3 ppm. The API test kit is basically useless for fishless cycling. The level at which nitrite would be working against one would be about 16.5 ppm on the API kit which only goes as high as 5 ppm. This has to do with how it measures.
Also, do not use bottled drinking aka spring water for fish. If you can not treat your tap to make it OK then you should use a mix of distilled or ro and tap. Here is a summary from a study conducted in Cleveland to compare the quality of municipal drinking water vs bottled waters:
We were interested not only in the potability of drinking water, but also in the purity of thewater as determinedby total bacterial counts in the samples. One of the reasons people choose todrink bottled water instead of tap water is because of the per-ceivedpurityof bottledwater 29; however,while two thirds of the bottled water samples had lower bacterial counts than the tap water samples (32 brands of bottled water had levels!0.01 CFU/mL), one quarter of the bottled water samples contained bacterial counts more than 10 times higher than those of the tap water samples. Similar resultswere noted in a survey of 103 brands of bottled water that found that at least one third had levels of bac-teria and chemicals that exceeded the industry’s own guidelines for purity. 30
From
http
/courses.washington.edu/h2owaste/bottled_water.pdf
If you indeed have such high levels of ammonia in your tap you may need to deal with it in some other fashion. But to have the levels of ammonia you indicate you should also be seeing high nitrates as well. If the ammonia is in the system, then so are the nitrifying bacteria and they should be converting ammonia to nitrate before it comes out of your tap.
The part of cycling most folks fail to understand is that the way to prevent nitrites from getting too high is to control how much and how often one doses ammonia. Most folks are being told to dose too much and too often. After the initial dose, no more ammonia should be added until it drops back to 0. At that point one can dose again, but to a lower level and then wait again. The other thing to know is that while a lower pH will make ammonia less toxic, it has the opposite effect on nitrite. The lower the pH the more toxic nitrite gets. This is true whether its fish or nitrifying bacteria involved.
The bacteria will not starve if they are not fed every day, the cycle will not stop either. The only other thing to monitor is your KH,which is fine at 4 dg. This essentially measures carbonate hardness and the bacteria need the inorganic carbon that they get from the carbonates.
I have one last suggestion. To get a reliable reading of your ammonia levels, test right after adding the Prime. The longer you wait, the less reliable the reading becomes. Here is how SeaChem explains it:
A salicylate based kit can be used, but with caution. Under the conditions of a salicylate kit the ammonia-Prime complex will be broken down eventually giving a false reading of ammonia (same as with other products like Prime®), so the key with a salicylate kit is to take the reading right away. However, the best solution ;-) is to use our MultiTest: Ammonia™ kit... it uses a gas exchange sensor system which is not affected by the presence of Prime® or other similar products. It also has the added advantage that it can detect the more dangerous free ammonia and distinguish it from total ammonia (which is both the free and ionized forms of ammonia (the ionized form is not toxic)).
The API kit is a salicylate one.
