Marc's Tank

[car.crash]

hows my water coming along people
i added 5ppm of ammonia over a week ago. are things moving in the right direction. im desperate to get some fish.

 

[car.crash]

once the ammonia drops am i good to go?

 

[blur411]

You need the ammonia and nitrites to be at 0 consistently before it is safe to add fish.

 

[OldMan47]

You are making the first step. Your ammonia dropping to 2 ppm and the nitrite rising to about 0.25 ppm indicates some minor progress but is not near the end of a cycle. You will get to the point that your ammonia addition will be gone by 12 hours in and at that time your nitrite will probably be so high that you cannot read it. Once it comes back down to zero, you can then start measuring the ability of your filter to turn the ammonia reading into a zero while keeping the nitrite reading at zero. When that set of circumstances prevails, you will be cycled. It will not be this week or even next week.