Middle Of Fishless Cycle. Questions

[ac106]

So i doing a fishless cycle in a 10 us gal tank

i posted before that i tested straight tapwater and it showed ammonia. I added stress coat to tap water and still showed the ammonia.

Anyway, I started the cycle 3 days ago. It took almost 30 drops of ammonia to get it up to 5PPM. I used a new filter and substrate and added some fake plants, rocks, and a small pot from an established tank.

here are my readings today:

Ammonia: between 2.0-4.0 card goes in increments of 2 so i can't be exact
Nitrite: hard to tell really but I think it was around 1.0
Nitrate: around 40

I wish I could be more accurate but the color is never same as the card and the increments seem big so I am having trouble figuring out exactly what the levels are.

are these readings correct for this stage of the cycle?

 

[Jue]

Hi

I don't know whether this will be much help but when I tried to do my readings they didn't look like the colours on the card unless I did them in daylight. They seem to match up quite acurately then.

Hope this helps.
Jue

 

[rdd1952]

It sounds like your cycling is proceeding as expected, maybe a little ahead of schedule. If the ammonia has dropped from 5 to say 3, then you would expect to see about 1 ppm of nitrite. Actually, the 40 ppm of nitrate sounds a little high (not that it's a problem, just seems a little quick for it to climb that much) but you may have some of that in your tap water too. And the colors on most kits are hard to differentiate, especially the nitrates. For me, (an API kit) any thing on nitrates over about 20 ppm all look like the same color.

 

[RoyalGrammaPrincessHannah]

Yeah test kits are always hard to read, and different lighting affects it hugely. Your cycling seems to be going fine, and the plants will eat the nitrate soon. But you need to be doing something about your water source having ammonia [but hopefully the test color was just looking wierd]. There is no level that is ok for fish. A reverse osmosis unit would be ideal, but maybe a little expensive, as it is not essential for FW like it is SW. Maybe you could look into aome other kind of purification system that will remove ammonia. This should be done before adding any fish, if indeed the test was reading correctly.

If it is aquarium pharmeceuticals, and it is looking like .25, in daylight I find that it always looks like .25, but under incandescent lighting, it is 0, which is the correct one.