Yes, during a fishless cycle it helps to think of your tank water as a "bacterial growing soup" (it will all be changed out right before the first fish stocking anyway) and to try to optimize things for the bacteria. Sounds like you have tap water, homebase plain ammonia and a test kit and are all ready to go!
If you've got adult patience and no kids complaining to see things in the tank, a plain, almost bare tank fishless cycle can have advantages. One of the problems with fishless cycling is that by having ammonia in the water, an algae trigger is provided if the tank is exposed to a lot of light (light + ammonia = algae.) So keeping things simple, not putting decorations or plants in there and not runnuing lights most of the time can keep the algae off the things you will want to look nice in the future. (You don't -have- to do this, its better if explained up front!)
As you know, a daily one-line log entry is nice to post in your fishless cycle thread here:
Day X, am/pm, Temperature, Ammonia(NH3) Result, Nitrite(NO2) Result, pH, Nitrate(NO3) Result, Amt.Ammonia Added (if added), Notes(anything added to tank, water change, etc.)
is a good template off the top of my head.
It is also important to keep an aquarium notebook (simple spiral notebook for instance) (in paper so it survives laptop meltdowns) where you record these same entries plus more detail for yourself. Every little transaction with your tank is fun to record in that diary and it becomes more and more helpful to look back at over time. Its especially useful to have the entries on the days when new fish were introduced.
The homebase ammonia is probably 9.5% concentration (the other 90.5% is distilled water) and you can enter that concentration and your tank volume into the ammonia calculator that's on our calculator at the top of the page to get a starting milliliter number to think about. What I usually do with that is start with some easy number that's 75 or 80% or something of that number so that my ammonia dose is coming in a little low. I dose that to the dechlorinated tap water in the tank and then wait 20min and test the water for ammonia. In the case of the API ammonia test, you just want to feel that it looks more like the 4ppm number than the 8ppm number. If so then I might add the other tiny bit of ammonia to make it match what the calculator said and wait 20min again and see that it basically still looks the same. If so then I'll accept this milliliter amount as my standard dose that I'm going to plan to use through most of the fishless cycle.
Its also good to think about when you will usually be home to be able to test and dose. In the final phase of fishless cycling (and sometimes before, when you're curious) you will want to perform "12-hour tests" in addition to your normal "24-hour tests." For most people this means you'll want to pick a particular hour that works for you as both a morning time and an evening time (such as 7am and 7pm, that sort of thing.) One of those (the one where you will be most free to take actions, like doing a new ammonia dose or changing water) will become your main 24-hour testing time (often many of us call this the "add-hour" and its like 7pm or something) (this way your add-hour would be 7pm and if you did a 12-hour test it would be at 7am as an example.) You probably know all this and think I'm nuts but I sometimes find later it wasn't clear and now is when my coffee was strong
.
The filter should be all ready, no carbon or zeolite or other weird stuff, just sponge, ceramic rings or ceramic gravel, floss and the like, all depending you your particular filter (which, by the way should be noted in the first thread of the fishless cycle, along with tank volume and tap water results.)
So are you ready to go? Lot's of our members who are regular here in the beginner's section can help, obviously, if you have further startup questions.
~~waterdrop~~
