My First Fishless Cycle

[Miss Wiggle]

hey guys, anyone remember me?

not been around for a while and been out of the hobby as well as the forum, life went a little crazy but is somewhere near back on track now (finds some wood to touch!).

for those that remember me you might like to know Ian and I got married this summer which was a lovely day, went to the Caribbean on our honeymoon and enjoyed snorkeling and swimming with sting rays and nursing sharks. we've just moved house and decided as we have a little more space and hopefully more time we'd re-set up our 220l tank. we've got some lovely new equipment, pretty luminaire and a massive filter which Ian has really enjoyed playing with.

so as we're doing the tank from scratch we've decided to fishless cycle which is a whole new experience for me, I've not done one before! My first tank was fish-in cycled before I knew better and every one since then just got cloned from other ones so I've never had to do it.

we set up the tank yesterday with it's new equipment, substrate etc and it just got me thinking of you guys so thought I'd pop in and say Hi.

mission for this week is to find somewhere nearby selling ammonia as we're new to the area we haven't finished exploring yet! we do have a pretty got maidenhead aquatics not 5 minutes away which is handy though.

anyway the tanks gonna be low-tech planted, no CO2 but decent lights, fertlised substrate and may dose ferts/do root tabs etc if it needs it. we've some lovely twisty wood which forms the centre piece of the tank and will have easy plants like swords, crypts and basic stem plans.

fish wish it'll be a few big shoals of small fish, probably harlequins and and cardinals although not totally made our mind up yet. handful of dwarf chain loaches, shoal of cories (I want panda's, need to convince Ian though), pair of natural coloured angels and then a small group of dwarf cichlids - apistogramma or such like. keeping it nice and easy and straight forward, nothing too challenging but should be a nice community.

anyway I'll stop waffling and will keep you posted how the cycle goes - lets see if I can remember how this is supposed to work?!

 

[BigIan]

sounds pretty good to me,

you soooo should get ada aqua soil, and inject co2

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome back MW. It has indeed been a long time. Have you had a look at the list of media donors yet? I link to it in my signature area.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

Nah we want to fully cycle it, we had some problems with black beard algea and such like in the old tank so don't want to risk importing any more nasties. Want a clean set up!

Anyway day 1 of the cycle was interesting, my dearest hubby has got a bit slapdash in his old age and thought you needed to dose ammonia up to 30 ppm! He then dosed it up and ran an ammonia test, didn't leave the test long enough to develop and decided there wasn't enough ammonia in so added another 10ml.

I came home a few hrs later, tested for ammonia and it was showing darker than 8ppm so we did about a 60% water change and we'll see what it's like this morning as ammonia levels that high will actually inhibit bacteria growth!

In other news our tap water at the new house has a pH of 7.1 and 0 nitrate in it which is quite pleasing!

 

[waterdrop]

the new beginners are totally not going to get the irony of this.. Possibly one of the best ever fishless cycler advisors posting up her beginner fishless cycling post as if we were starting from scratch.

All I can do is...

...but I know you wouldn't have it any other way.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Miss Wiggle]

i've never done a fishless cycle before though..... not kidding!

how u doing anyway WD? hows your tank nowadays.

anyway day 1 results - no shift in ammonia, didn't see the point in testing anything else. unsurprising although Ian has already started getting twitchy and impatient for fish!

 

[toshapetriji]

We´ve been missing you Miss Wiggle

Welcome Home

 

[CheniseMummy]

hi toshapetriji sent you a pm sorry to crash thread.

Welcome back miss wiggle

 

[Miss Wiggle]

Slight drop in ammonia today, about 4ppm. No nitrite or nitrate though and we added new plants yesterday so I assume they have had some of the ammonia. Nom nom nom!!

 

[markandhisfish]

the new beginners are totally not going to get the irony of this.. Possibly one of the best ever fishless cycler advisors posting up her beginner fishless cycling post as if we were starting from scratch.

All I can do is...

...but I know you wouldn't have it any other way.

~~waterdrop~~

rolling on the floor too waterdrop!!! welcome back miss wiggle. i remember you very well , you helped me a lot when i 1st started a couple of years ago and helped avert some real disasters. its fair to say ive really upped my aquarium game since i last saw you on these boards , but it was all made possible by the advice you and others gave me from day 1 .

welcome back , looking forward to seeing some pics of your new tank.

ps im guessing youve obviously found some ammonia but the best place ive found is boots.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

hiya Mark, bless thanks for your kind words!

yeah hubby managed to find a boots that stocked ammonia so it's been in the tank a few days now. tanks not too exciting to look at right now, we've got a few nice bits of wood, some amazon swords and some crypts.... that's it! i'll put some pics up when the plants have bedded in properly and we've got fish in!

 

[markandhisfish]

you not even tempted to get some mature media to speed it up? i wouldnt have the patience to start a new fishless cycle
like you ive never done a fishless cycle . tank 1 was cycled by killing lots of fish and tank 2 i got a 2nd hand external fully cycled which was running on somebodys tank locally to me and it came literally straight from their tank onto mine. the only thing even resembling a cycle i have done is when i sold my sevs etc to get discus , there was a delay in getting the discus ( i ended up having no fish for about a month) and i used the fishless cycle theory to keep the filters alive while i waited.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

Nah not tempted, firstly I want to experience doing a full fishless cycle myself and secondly we want a clean set up - we had a problem with BBA in the last tank so decided to start everything fresh to get rid of it.

The only concession to mature media is we've stuck some of the rockwool from the plants into the tank, as it comes from the shop where we are likely to get our fish from so any problems they've got we'd bring in on the fish anyway so it's low risk!

 

[PDSimon]

Its good to see you post, when I was a cycle newbie there were articles and posts from you, and Waterdrop used to mention you too but I never saw you post until now I wonder if anything has changed in your time away!

 

[Miss Wiggle]

oh I'm sure it will have done - perhaps less so with the basics like cycling but in the more advaned stuff it will have undoubtdely progressed in the last few years.

Ian and I were quite excited by this solid state lighting, it was just coming out when we last looked and was really expensive but now seems a bit mroe readily available.