Just Starting A Fishless Cycle

[eb2]

? my ammonia is dropping but I don't have any nitrite yet?
last night ammonia dropped to 1 and I raised it up to about 4-5
it's been 24 hours and the ammonia is back down to 1 but I still don't have any nitrites yet?
do I wait for the ammonia to go to 0 before I add more, will I get some nitrites shortly?

 

[dzsigmond217]

I'm a newbie to fish but I think in order for nitrites to grow you have to have ammonia in the tank or they wont have anything to feed on. I would definitely not let ammonia drop to zero. But I could be wrong! Hope someone comes along who can help you better! Good luck!

 

[OldMan47]

If you have plants in the tank, I know where the ammonia went. Plants will remove ammonia in preference to nitrates if they have a good supply of it. Keep bumping the ammonia back up so the bacteria will have a source for their growth. It is not a good idea to rely completely on the plants, although it has been done, because the first time you have any trouble with the plants, its the fish that will suffer.

 

[waterdrop]

Sounds like you are doing fine to me. Sounds like you are in the first phase of fishless cycling prior to the "Nitrite Spike" and you lucky because you are seeing ammonia drop from 4-5ppm down to 1ppm in about 24 hours which is pretty fast.

Watching the actual test results for Nitrite at this point doesn't really tell you much, I think you may not see any or you may get various low readings. The only thing you care about is that one day you will drip the Nitrite test reagent into the tube and "bang!" it will show Nitrites like crazy -- this will be your "Nitrite Spike" and you can think of yourself as being in Phase 2, waiting for the second population to grow big enough to eat these Nitrites.

As to the timing of the adding of Ammonia, it really isn't as critical as you are worrying about. Nothing wrong with adding it when you see it down to 1ppm or 0ppm, either way, assuming you are at least thinking about it on a daily basis, which I think would be usual for most fishless cyclers. If it was higher than 0ppm in the AM and you got home in the evening and it was 0ppm should you worry your AOBs died? No, I think the best info is that if your ammonia source goes to zero, your AOB population would only drop by 1% or at most 5% after a day, which is too insignificant to be called a setback.

The important thing to observe with the Ammonia dropping is that as the days go by you are seeing it drop to zero more quickly and "more definitively" by which I mean that when it drops, you see the test color that represents zero very clearly (for me, that's just the psychological feeling of it, if that makes sense!)

Once you are seeing your "Nitrite Spike" (eg. 4-5ppm Nitrite whenever you test it) you can go easier on the adding of Ammonia. Every 1ppm used by the AOBs will produce 2.7ppm of Nitrite, so even small amounts of Ammonia will produce lots of Nitrite. Of course, you need to keep feeding the AOBs to keep their population up but by now their population is quite strong and will easily stay that way. At this point all you really care about is watching, as the days go by, for that Nitrite Spike to one day drop strongly to zero (indicating the NOB population has finally reached a big size!) [AOB=Ammonia Oxidizing Bacteria, NOB=Nitrite Oxidizing Bacteria]

Its good to be checking pH. If it drops down near 6.0, the cycling process could stall.

~~waterdrop~~
(sorry, don't know why I went on this long, morning coffee I guess!)

 

[eb2]

Sounds like you are doing fine to me. Sounds like you are in the first phase of fishless cycling prior to the "Nitrite Spike" and you lucky because you are seeing ammonia drop from 4-5ppm down to 1ppm in about 24 hours which is pretty fast.

Watching the actual test results for Nitrite at this point doesn't really tell you much, I think you may not see any or you may get various low readings. The only thing you care about is that one day you will drip the Nitrite test reagent into the tube and "bang!" it will show Nitrites like crazy -- this will be your "Nitrite Spike" and you can think of yourself as being in Phase 2, waiting for the second population to grow big enough to eat these Nitrites.

As to the timing of the adding of Ammonia, it really isn't as critical as you are worrying about. Nothing wrong with adding it when you see it down to 1ppm or 0ppm, either way, assuming you are at least thinking about it on a daily basis, which I think would be usual for most fishless cyclers. If it was higher than 0ppm in the AM and you got home in the evening and it was 0ppm should you worry your AOBs died? No, I think the best info is that if your ammonia source goes to zero, your AOB population would only drop by 1% or at most 5% after a day, which is too insignificant to be called a setback.

The important thing to observe with the Ammonia dropping is that as the days go by you are seeing it drop to zero more quickly and "more definitively" by which I mean that when it drops, you see the test color that represents zero very clearly (for me, that's just the psychological feeling of it, if that makes sense!)

Once you are seeing your "Nitrite Spike" (eg. 4-5ppm Nitrite whenever you test it) you can go easier on the adding of Ammonia. Every 1ppm used by the AOBs will produce 2.7ppm of Nitrite, so even small amounts of Ammonia will produce lots of Nitrite. Of course, you need to keep feeding the AOBs to keep their population up but by now their population is quite strong and will easily stay that way. At this point all you really care about is watching, as the days go by, for that Nitrite Spike to one day drop strongly to zero (indicating the NOB population has finally reached a big size!) [AOB=Ammonia Oxidizing Bacteria, NOB=Nitrite Oxidizing Bacteria]

Its good to be checking pH. If it drops down near 6.0, the cycling process could stall.

~~waterdrop~~
(sorry, don't know why I went on this long, morning coffee I guess!)

AHH thanks, oh should I add more media from my other tank? I am actually also wondering about maintaining an empty tank using amonia too

 

[waterdrop]

I think the issue of how much mature media to put in a new filter is more about how much you can stand to take out of the old one. Can't recall your situation but if the old filter must still operate a tank with inhabitants, the usual recommendation I've heard is to leave at least 2/3 mature media in the old tank, helping to avoid a mini-cycle in that old tank. The one-third you move to the new one should provide a good jump-start to the cycling of the new one.

Backtotropical has written some nice posts on the various permutations of cloning filters with mature media, you might want to search on his ID or something.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[eb2]

I think the issue of how much mature media to put in a new filter is more about how much you can stand to take out of the old one. Can't recall your situation but if the old filter must still operate a tank with inhabitants, the usual recommendation I've heard is to leave at least 2/3 mature media in the old tank, helping to avoid a mini-cycle in that old tank. The one-third you move to the new one should provide a good jump-start to the cycling of the new one.

Backtotropical has written some nice posts on the various permutations of cloning filters with mature media, you might want to search on his ID or something.

~~waterdrop~~

I was actually only considering taking some more gravel at this time, not actually disecting the sponge from the mature,if that matters, because the fishless set up is in a 2.5 gal bowl with like 1 plant in the wool, 1 floating plant and 2 handfuls of gravel

 

[OldMan47]

On the question of maintaining your cycled condition with ammonia, I just did that a few weeks ago and the new fish never knew any better. They acted like it was, as it really is, a long established tank. The bacteria don't really care where they get their ammonia either.