Leanne's Fishless Cycle

[OldMan47]

There is no need to waste nitrite tests at 12 hours until it shows a zero at 24 hours. If your ammonia is already processing regularly in 12 hours and you are in the nitrite spike, try adding only enough ammonia to get up to 2 ppm with each dose. At that point your ammonia processors are well established and the nitrite processors do not need exceedingly high concentrations to grow properly. Be careful with the nitrite test. If you first add your drops to the nitrite tube and it turns purple at the bottom of the test tube before you mix it, then goes to a light color when mixed, your reading is too high to read. Just record it as over 5 ppm.

 

[leannethenewbie]

Thank you for that information about the testing, I was unaware. It is turning purple as it hits the bottom, so I will amend my records to 5.0 +

I will also add a little less ammonia as well..

Thanks

 

[waterdrop]

Sounds like you are nicely in to the 2nd phase of fishless cycling (nitrite spike phase) and you can just settle in and expect to be there a while. Check pH every now and then with an eye to whether it starts to drop on you.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[leannethenewbie]

Sounds like you are nicely in to the 2nd phase of fishless cycling (nitrite spike phase) and you can just settle in and expect to be there a while. Check pH every now and then with an eye to whether it starts to drop on you.

~~waterdrop~~

Thanks Waterdrop

I'll do that

 

[leannethenewbie]

Soo.... *taps fingers on desk*

Well into my Nitrite spike.... still turning purple when the drops hit the bottom!!

Will it ever go down ?

Anyone fancy a game of scrabble??

 

[leannethenewbie]

OOOooo I have a question:


I'd really like some male guppies, I think they're so pretty

whats the minimum number you can have in a shoal? I'm pretty restricted with my 24 litres I know

Can anyone suggest any combinations? I'm a bit restricted in where I can get my fish - so no rare species please (as nice as that would be).

I was thinking 4 x male guppies,1 x cherry shrimp and maybe something else that doesn't need to shoal?


Is that too many? It probably is

 

[Twinklecaz]

I was gonna have 3 Male Guppies at one point and no-one said I couldn't. I know there are shoaling fish technically but I don't think they are quite like say Neons.

They'll tell you to have at least 5/6 Corys though. But you might be able to have Pygmys?

 

[PDSimon]

How high do you think you're nitrites are Leanne? You have been in the nitrite spike for a while and last time you tested your nitrates they were 160 more than a week ago?

You may need to do a big waterchange depending on what you say in reply to that ^

 

[leannethenewbie]

I was gonna have 3 Male Guppies at one point and no-one said I couldn't. I know there are shoaling fish technically but I don't think they are quite like say Neons.

They'll tell you to have at least 5/6 Corys though. But you might be able to have Pygmys?

Yeah - maybe 3 might be better then, better to understock than overstock!

ooo decisions, decisions.....

 

[leannethenewbie]

How high do you think you're nitrites are Leanne? You have been in the nitrite spike for a while and last time you tested your nitrates they were 160 more than a week ago?

You may need to do a big waterchange depending on what you say in reply to that ^

The drops are turning purple when they hit the bottom of the test tube, so still over 5.0

I haven't tested the nitrates for a while, so I'll do that later on today.

I wanted to just get an idea of stocking, while I'm waiting for those nitrites to lower...

 

[waterdrop]

I would not call any of the livebearers shoaling fish. Livebearers (guppies, swordfish, platies, mollies, endlers and quite a few others) are just quite different from shoaling fish in many ways. For instance, one way to see the difference would be when you put your arm and hand down in the tank to work. If you made a sudden movement, livebearers would just individually jump about a little, whereas as soon as my arm goes in, my shoaling fish tighten up their school and they will dart as a group (unless things got -really- close and fast and scary for them in which they'd get broken up but you'd still likely see them in pairs and threes until the whole group could shoal again.

Your pH seems to be maintaining and I assume your heater is holding things at 29C so there's no real call to do anything differently at this point. (There is our little internal debate about whether a few large water changes at this stage will really help things but we have to remember that's mostly theoretical and there's no data to support that variation in approach really being superior to doing nothing.) For you Leanne, and any newbie reading this, the idea of a large gravel-clean-water-change during the 2nd or 3rd phase of fishless cycling is that you take the water down to the gravel and then top back up with good technique and don't forget to re-dose your ammonia and then test it a half-hour later to double-check. The hope is that removing some of the nitrite and nitrate might help the N-Bacs grow a little better but its not really proven.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[leannethenewbie]

Hi Waterdrop

Thank you for that, I wasn't aware of the difference.

With regards to water change - I had read that in the beginners resource centre as well. Hmmmmm
To be honest... if it's not proven to help much, and others have not done it and succeeded in cycling, then I don't see much point in upsetting everything.

I'm a patient person, so don't mind the wait.

...... sort of

 

[waterdrop]

I'll bet I can out-patience you - my fishless cycle ended on Day 142 (ok, now that I've enjoyed the shock value I have to say its not fair to say that because Oliver's tank broke in the middle of that right as the cycle was finally finishing and I sort of saved the bacteria but fishless cycled just about as long after replacing the tank. And to be fair I was quite caught up in experimenting, not in getting the fish necessarily.) WD

 

[leannethenewbie]

142 days!!

Crikey... def not helped by fish tank breakage!!

 

[PDSimon]

142 days WD, and you're the one advising us on how to cycle? Just kidding!

I found when I did a waterchange in the nitrite spike stage it helped speed up the processing of nitrite