My Fishless Cycle (Add And Wait Method)

[PDSimon]

I'm pretty sure oldman would agree with me... They need to be fed, but not excessively!

It may indeed process the ammonia in 12 hours, but you're going to start reducing the amount of ammonia you add in the second stage to 2 or 3ppm! This means its pointless cycling 5ppm ammonia in 12 hours at this point.

I said only add ammonia when its 0 or close, but when oldman and waterdrop say this I am certain its because they only want you to test once a day on the first and second stages

 

[LondonguyJ]

I'm pretty sure oldman would agree with me... They need to be fed, but not excessively!

It may indeed process the ammonia in 12 hours, but you're going to start reducing the amount of ammonia you add in the second stage to 2 or 3ppm! This means its pointless cycling 5ppm ammonia in 12 hours at this point.

I said only add ammonia when its 0 or close, but when oldman and waterdrop say this I am certain its because they only want you to test once a day on the first and second stages

I just added enough to raise the ammonia count to 3ppm. Although this is a guestimate as my colour chart goes from 2.4 -4.9 I'll test for ammonia again in an hour so that I can update the data

out of interest when would you have waited to top up the ammonia?

 

[PDSimon]

The same time I added it on day 1 (that looks like when you last added it anyway)

 

[waterdrop]

Right, Si is telling you the correct stuff. If you have an active thread on your fishless cycle we can help you make various refinements to the RDD instructions, but RDD and many of us are all in this together and what happens is we read each others threads and advice and try to pass along the refinements to our latest beginners, this is what's happening to you.

When you add enough pure ammonia to reach 3 to 5ppm in the tank, its a LOT of ammonia from the standpoint of nature's nitrogen cycle. If you add this twice a day because 12hour tests are showing zero ppm ammonia, what you'll end up with is way too much nitrite and nitrate in the system for the N-Bacs to handle and in fact they won't grow because the nitrite and nitrate will suppress them. It also turns out that feeding the bacteria only once each 24 hours is a common technique in the waste water industry. Its called "pulsing" and can result in better growth of autotrophic bacteria, which is what we want.

What you want right now is to establish a particular hour of the morning or evening which will be your so-called "add-hour," the hour out of 24 when you will "pulse" your ammonia dose to the tank. Making this regular will help the waves of test products be more understandable over time. Dosing only once in 24 hours will create less excess nitrite for the long period of the nitrite spike phase.

Gotta run, but I'll try to catch this thread again and I'm sure the other members will keep helping,

~~waterdrop~~

 

[LondonguyJ]

The same time I added it on day 1 (that looks like when you last added it anyway)

I added the first dose at 10pm the tonights top up was at 12am

Right, Si is telling you the correct stuff. If you have an active thread on your fishless cycle we can help you make various refinements to the RDD instructions, but RDD and many of us are all in this together and what happens is we read each others threads and advice and try to pass along the refinements to our latest beginners, this is what's happening to you.

I genuinely appreciate the input. This is my first fishless cycle and I am aiming to get it right so all advice is more than welcome and clearly needed

When you add enough pure ammonia to reach 3 to 5ppm in the tank, its a LOT of ammonia from the standpoint of nature's nitrogen cycle. If you add this twice a day because 12hour tests are showing zero ppm ammonia, what you'll end up with is way too much nitrite and nitrate in the system for the N-Bacs to handle and in fact they won't grow because the nitrite and nitrate will suppress them. It also turns out that feeding the bacteria only once each 24 hours is a common technique in the waste water industry. Its called "pulsing" and can result in better growth of autotrophic bacteria, which is what we want.

What you want right now is to establish a particular hour of the morning or evening which will be your so-called "add-hour," the hour out of 24 when you will "pulse" your ammonia dose to the tank. Making this regular will help the waves of test products be more understandable over time. Dosing only once in 24 hours will create less excess nitrite for the long period of the nitrite spike phase.

Gotta run, but I'll try to catch this thread again and I'm sure the other members will keep helping,

~~waterdrop~~

You know, I think there has been a major mix up somewhere and that's probably down to my wording or lack of. To be clear, I do not plan on adding ammonia twice a day. I was merely plan on testing the water twice daily as I wanted to track when the ammonia bacs started processing the 3ppm in 12hours or less.

I hope that is clear and more importantly, the right way to continue.

 

[LondonguyJ]

I'll test the ammonia today at 10pm two hours short of 24 simply because I want to switch the time I add ammonia and conduct the tests daily, to an earlier one. Tomorrow at 10am I'll "test" to see what the ammonia count is.

Note: Even if the ammonia has dropped to 0 I wont be raising the ammonia count until 10pm

Pdsimon Waterdrop and everyone else. What do you think?

 

[PDSimon]

It's fine

 

[LondonguyJ]

Cheers PDSimon


I just got through testing an hour later than I planned (though still plan to make 10pm my testing/add time). The ammonia is 0 and the Nitrite is a darkest colour on the chart

I need to read up on rrd's cycle directions as I can't really remember what my next step is. I would do it now but it has been the very longest of days.

J

 

[PDSimon]

For me, the next stage was processing 5ppm of ammonia within 24 hours

 

[LondonguyJ]

Tested again today and the ammonia has dropped to 0 My nitrite chart has several shades of purple but when tested the nitrite level looks red

nitrate is also off the chart

@ PDSimon I'll add the same dose I used to begin the cycle and see what results that yields in 12 & (if necessary) 24 hours.

I guess I'm waiting for my nitrite to drop now. I've done some rudimentary calculations and think this will happen within 24 days But I guess now it's a case of wait and see as math has never been my strong point

 

[JoshuaA]

Don't worry about the Nitrate test, its severely effected by the level of Nitrite in your tank currently and I doubt you will get a realistic level which hasn't been compromised by Nitrite.

Otherwise its going good !

Keep an eye on your pH too! If you keep adding Ammonia and the Nitrite isn't being processed you'll eventually have a massive concentration of Nitrite which in turn will make your pH drop quite a lot. If it drops enough and you end up in the range of 6-6.6 I would immediately do a water change before your 24 Ammonia redose time. I've noticed 8 definitely is the best pH for bacteria the process speeds up but trying to keep it at that pH is mighty difficult.

 

[LondonguyJ]

Cheers JoshuaA

Though I have a small confession. I don't know what my PH is exactly. I know its somewhere in the 7's but I accidentally threw out the ph test book/chart with the recycling

I have just finished ordering a new nutrafin test kit as the ammonia bottle has already been halved. Hopefully it'll be delivered on Monday

 

[waterdrop]

I was just thinking, no problem, I'll just head up to his first post and check his baselines.. but actually you don't have any baseline pH posted there either! I was going to say that if it started fairly high then it would be unlikely this early in the game to have dropped all that much.

I also agree with Joshua that nitrate(NO3) results probably won't be all that useful for a while (although I'd probably still bother to log them once a week or so) since that test is thrown off so much by high nitrite(NO2) usually. The nitrite and nitrate high readings are much more likely to get kind of glued together in the Nutrafin kit than in the API kit for some reason, but it doesn't matter as I think high nitrite(NO2) still makes the API nitrate(NO3) test unreliable too.

Plus, the only real main "function" the tests are playing right now is to help you watch for the eventual end of the 2nd phase (the "nitrite spike" phase) of the fishless cycle, and to guard against a quick drop in pH, which would stall the speed of the process. And yes, its correct that a pH of 8.0 to 8.4 is the summit of the speed graph for N-Bac (and A-Bac to a slightly lesser extent) growth. Process speed tapers off slowly through the 7's, get steeper in the 6's and then stalls and stops at 6.2 down to 6.0 pH.

(This is not to be confused with the idea of whether the bacteria could function down at these low pH values in a "running fishtank," they can! Its just that during cycling we are more sensitive to having the process move along more quickly and the act of having the pH -drop down- on us will stall the bacteria and slow the process way down. Its the shock of a pH drop that stalls out the bacteria. In a normal running tank, over a long slow period of time, they would recover from that shock and slowly resume a certain amount of nitrogen cycling. A lot of beginners confuse this and think the bacteria stop altogether or die, which they don't!)

~~waterdrop~~

 

[LondonguyJ]

I tested again at 7 am this morning and my ammonia count had dropped from 4.9 to 0.6 in just under 9 hours.

Then I went back to sleep as is recommended on a weekend

Have just run another test (10am) and the ammonia is 0 and I'm very pleased by that result. I'll be raising the count to 3ppm at 10pm today


@ waterdrop & JoshuaA I had left the water to stand 24 hours before adding it to the aquarium and beginning the cycle so checking the baseline ph should be a simple ph test under the same conditions right? I should be getting the test delivered to work on Tuesday.

 

[LondonguyJ]

Posted the 36 day theory as a note on my log. Fingers crossed (tightly) in the hope that I'm right.

PH test tomorrow