Newish Tank

[eaglesaquarium]

You might want to consider a water change to drop the nitrites. The bacteria you want prefer trace levels of nitrites (~0.14ppm), while their main competition prefers levels closer to 14ppm. Each 1ppm ammonia added will add ~2.7ppm nitrite. (It is also for this reason that the general consensus by the experts - not me - recommend waiting on a zero ammonia reading before dosing up the ammonia again. Once the filter is matured, the ammonia readings will (or at least should) always read zero, but the bacteria survive on the continual trace levels of ammonia. I would wait until the ammonia drops to no higher than 0.25ppm.

 

[Smells a bit fishy]

Ok day 3.

Ammonia-0
Nitrites- off the scale
Nitrates- 80-100ppm

Re-dosed to 4ppm.

That is the first time apart from tap water checks ive seen ammonia totally yellow.

I will continue to cycle I think, or should I put the filter into my other tank, where the ammonia is still rising about .5ppm per day. Another thing is that the other tank hasn't produced any nitrites either. Or the ammonia bacteria isn't fast enough and the nitrites are being eaten so to speak. Is that possible?

Also I am going away for 4 days next week. The bacteria won't suvive that long and the other tank need a boost of bacteria.

Any thoughts?

 

[eaglesaquarium]

Ok day 3.

Ammonia-0
Nitrites- off the scale
Nitrates- 80-100ppm

Re-dosed to 4ppm.

That is the first time apart from water checks ive seen ammonia totally yellow.

I will continue to cycle I think, or should I put the filter into my other tank, where the ammonia is still rising about .5ppm per day. Another thing is that the other tank hasn't produced any nitrites either. Or the ammonia bacteria isn't fast enough and the nitrites are being eaten so to speak. Is that possible?

Also I am going away for 4 days next week. The bacteria won't suvive that long and the other tank need a boost of bacteria.

Any thoughts?

There are several different possibilities of where you can go from here. You could run BOTH filters in the tank with the fish. This will cycle both filters and then you have two working filters. Any bacteria that have developed in the one that you were fishless cycling would then help to keep ammonia levels lower for the fish, but that will obviously drive up the nitrite levels until the N-bacs catch up. (1ppm ammonia becomes 2.7ppm nitrite, which in turn becomes 3.4ppm nitrate. So the N-bacs will need a bigger colony to deal with the ammonia.) This could shorten the fish-in cycle a bit.


When your one tank is cycled, you can move the second filter back, and then you would be in a new cycle for both tanks. Theoretically, you'd be taking some bacteria out of the tank with the fish, and the ammonia/nitrites could rise again for a few days. This shouldn't last too long, but you need to keep an eye on it. You could finish the other tank by fishless cycling it before you put fish in there. That should be very short, lasting only a few days.

 

[Smells a bit fishy]

Yeh I was thinking exactly the same. As I think the smaller tank might have more good bacteria than the big one. So that would help sort that tank out.

Thanks for the info on how much of each is produced. I was wondering if anyone new that lol.

I think I may see how long it will take. I will continue doing the fishless cycle till Monday and assess the situation. I think maybe a bit longer than a few days as I'm only going into stage 2 almost. But I will start doing 12 hour testing tomorrow evening to better assess the situation.

But the ammonia good bacteria, (n-bacs is it?) will die whilst I'm away. So I will more than likely put it in my bigger tank so they don't die, and them move the smaller filter back into my tank once the bigger tank has finished. Does that make sense? Lol

 

[eaglesaquarium]

It makes a bit of sense.


The N-bacs (as some call them) are the ones that process the Nitrite. Officially they are nitrospira.


The A-bacs (as some call them) are the ones that process the Ammonia. Officially they are nitrosomona and nitrosospira.


If you have fish in a tank, there is no reason not to put the second filter in there so that it can stay seeded and help out the other filter as well.

 

[Smells a bit fishy]

Cool. That's what I'm going to do then. Thanks for your help.

 

[Smells a bit fishy]

Ok just done a test after 20 hours:

Ammonia- 0

Nitrites - off the scale

Nitrates 100-120.

Question is how much ammonia should I add? Also should I do a water change to bring down the level of nitrites. I have seen a difference in views on this one.

 

[Smells a bit fishy]

Ok. Re-dosed to 5ppm again at 9pm. Will check tomorrow at 9.
Should I be adding less ammonia now and do a water change to lower nitrites?

 

[eaglesaquarium]

I would say defintely lower the ammonia dose. I will defer to others about the water change.

 

[Smells a bit fishy]

Day 5 (12 hour test)

Ammonia 2ppm

Nitrites- off the scale.

Ran out of time to do the rest. Will do it when I get back from work

 

[waterdrop]

With nitrite(NO2) measuring off the scale, we have plenty of experience that you can lower your dosing to low levels like 2ppm and carry on dosing once every 24 hours (if the ammonia has dropped to zero, which it usually will have) and the fishless cycle will proceed at a normal pace, possibly even a day or so faster than if you continued to dose up to 5ppm straight on through the nitrite spike period.

There is also some speculation on our part (this being experimental and -not- something we really have cases of yet) that if you had the time and energy and wanted to... you could do repeated water changes (with ammonia recharges of course) in an effort to keep nitrite quite low despite it being produced at a very rapid rate during this phase (what is happening at this phase is that the A-Bacs are pumping out nitrite at a furious rate but there are not nearly enough N-Bacs yet to process all that output.) How one would proceed with this sort of very much lower maintaining of concentration is of course all speculation at this point - it may be that daily water changes combined with very low 12 hour dosing of some sort would be a pattern that could be tried. One would need to get a feel for it based on measurement feedback. The goal of course would be to see whether the greatly lowered nitrite concentration would encourage the N-Bacs to reproduce a little faster and of course shave off a few more days from the overall process, which would of course be difficult to determine on any one fishless cycle since the overall days vary greatly anyway! (Non-seeded fishless cycles vary anywhere from 30 days to 100 days very roughly.)

Whether this sort of experimentation is worth it to any one new beginner doing a fishless cycle is a good question. It could easily be a lot more work (water changes) for little or no noticable improvement, but on the other hand it is one of the areas that at least makes sense from a speculative standpoint.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[eaglesaquarium]

Waterdrop is referencing, I believe, Dr. TIm Havonec's post here on TFF.

The reason why one finds Nitrospira and not Nitrobacter in these systems has to do with the nitrite concentrations. As Regan et al 2002 describes starting on page 79, a low-nitrite environment selects for Nitrospira while a high nitrite environment will select for Nitrobacter. Optimum growth for Nitrospira is a nitrite concentration around 0.14 mg/L NO2-N. For Nitrobacter the optimal nitrite concentration for grow is around 14 mg/l NO2-N which is a toxic concentration for most freshwater fishes.

So, the closer you can keep your nitrites in line with 0.14ppm rather than on the scale of 14ppm (off the scale) the better you may be able to culture nitrospira, which is the bacteria you actually want in the home aquarium.

 

[Smells a bit fishy]

Thankyou all very much. I will probably do a large water change tonight on the tank and get it nice and clean, and add 5ppm of ammonia to it.

I will evaluate the situation on Monday on whether to move the filter or media into my larger tank, as this morning looks like something might be starting to happen as I got a reading of .25ppm of nitrite finally!!

Or the other option is to put some fish in my smaller tank to release some pressure of the bacteria in my big tank. Both of these options seem valid, unless I'm missing something. If I am could please let me know.

I will probably move the ruby barbs and my Molly over as both seem to school together. (strange). However I think I might seed the bigger tank with the smaller filter media as the fish will only be in the tank for a week or so.

 

[Smells a bit fishy]

Day 5 (24 hour test)

Ammonia - .25 arrggghhh!!

Nitrites - off the scale

Nitrates - 160ppm

Ph - 7.6

Just as I thought I may be getting somewhere. Oh well see what happens tomorrow morning!

 

[Smells a bit fishy]

These are pictures of how my smaller tank has evolved over the last few days.....

Still need to attach my backdrop for it, and a couple more plants aswell. But I think its pretty much there