My Cycle Is Going Wrong!

[caino]

I have been doing a fishless cycle for 4 weeks now and my ammonia is comming down nicly. The problem is my nitrites are off the scale and have been for about 10 days now, my pH is off the scale and my test kit goes up to 10. Should i do a water change. I have an airpump on with no airstone in the end the temp is raised and i leave the light on 24/7. I have got till firday for it to finish as i am going away and ill have to start it all again and at the moment i am a bit cheesed off!!

 

[BFG]

I have been doing a fishless cycle for 4 weeks now and my ammonia is comming down nicly. The problem is my nitrites are off the scale and have been for about 10 days now, my pH is off the scale and my test kit goes up to 10. Should i do a water change. I have an airpump on with no airstone in the end the temp is raised and i leave the light on 24/7. I have got till firday for it to finish as i am going away and ill have to start it all again and at the moment i am a bit cheesed off!!

I had a similar problem when I did mine. This is just my thoughts on the matter, but I came to the conclusion that really high nitrites were causing the cycle to pause (either that, or it was so far off scale I had no idea what the bacteria were processing). I did a rather large water change, and refilled with conditioned water. Once the temp was back up, I put my filter media back into my internal filter (it had been floating in a bucket of tank water for the hr or so whilst I did the water change). Within a few days the tank was cycling with ammonia the way it should have been (5ppm amm, and 0 amm and 0 nitrIte after 24hrs).

Worth a try if you're getting impatient / need it finished!

 

[caino]

Thanks a lot, i will go and do a water change now, btw how long did it take your nitrites to go back down?

 

[dthoffsett]

Doing a water change may slow down your cycle even more. In general it take Nitrite twice as long to drop as it did the ammonia. For example, it took 10 days for the ammonia to reach zero, it will take 20 days for the nitrite to drop. Just have patience, it took 6 weeks to cycle my first tank, but it was well worth the wait. Also, PH will fluctuate dramatically when you fishless cycle.

 

[carrera]

thats a normal part of fishless cycling. you are adding ammonia all the time which is being turned into nitrite which is just stacking up while the bacteria build up.

the nitrites will normally be off the scale for around 2 weeks, then out of no where, will drop.

just let it be.

 

[BFG]

My issue is that if the nitrites are way off scale, then to get back down to zero will take a while. The bacteria could well be processing the amount produced by 5ppm ammonia, but because they've got so much nitrite to munch through, it takes a while for you to see the result via water testing.

I can obviously only comment on what happened with me, but each to their own

I will say though, that once it looked like the tank was getting rid of the ammonia within the required timescale, I replicated that over several days to make sure it was repeatable.

 

[caino]

thanks for the tips guys. i did the water change and i will let you know how im doing, i think my problem is that im trying to rush it, i did add way too much ammonia at the start and a water change delt with that so this huge nitrite spike may be a side effect of me beeng a bit stupid o well live and learn atleast there are no fish in there!