My Fishless Cycle, Oh And 1 Snail!

[Detritus]

Hi All
Iv been following all the various instructions on this great site and I am about 8 days into my fishless cycle with a 23l tank.
I'm on my 2nd cycle of ammonia after it dropped to 0.6 and now I've added more to get it back up to 4 to 5 ppm.

My current tests are as follows:
PH = 7
Ammonia = 4 to 5 ppm (i added about 0.7ml of Ammonia in yesterday to bring it back up again)
Nitrite = 3.3+ (goes of my scale)
Nitrate = 50 to 60

I have mature media in there to help with bacteria, 1 log and 2 ceramics. I also have 3 small plants in there and my lights are on for about 4 to 6 hours a day. I have a very small amount of algae at the moment which has appeared very slowly over the past 1 to 2 days, but only very slight.

My question today is, should I be doing a water change to bring down the Nitrate or should I leave it be for the moment?

And another question -

I also have spotted a tiny snail in there, seems I have live things in there as well lol, probably when I bought the mature media. I plan on getting a assasin snail anyway so I dont think I need to panic yet, do I??

And again really impressed with this website, great to have somewhere to go as a novice.

Regards
David

 

[chrisbassist]

Don't worry about a water change yet unless you desperately want to protect the snails. Or unless you're ph crashes. You only need to do a change once you are ready for fish. Having the nitrate there won't slow the cycle.

 

[waterdrop]

I agree, your pH is still good and the nitrate(NO3) is not too high yet so not a great need to disturb things yet. Since your nitrite(NO2) has now spiked higher than your test kit can measure and 0.7ml got you to 4-5ppm, you could try 0.5ml and see what that gets you (hopefully might pull it down to just 3ppm which would be about perfect during the nitrite spike phase.) That helps to make the overall spike not be as extreme, which means there's less NO2 for the N-Bacs to process to finally get the levels back down lower than the 3.3 cap on measuring.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[waterdrop]

Detritus, As an extra note on this, my thinking was to wait a day or two and see if the nitrate(NO3) went up still further and whether the pH showed a little more drop and then I was going to recommend the usual "reset" water change of 90% with ammonia recharge. There are a few indications from the scientists that high concentration of either NO2 or NO3 (or both, obviously) can cause the N-Bacs (in particular, but possibly the A-Bacs too) to slow somewhat from their optimal growth pace.

Sitting here on Saturday morning it occurred to me that you might just prefer to do a water change on the weekend, not after the week starts!

~~waterdrop~~