Nf "cycle"

[Piti]

So with my new tank it came with a sample (a rather big one) of Nutrafin "Cycle"

My question is this is not declorinator is it??? It says nothing of the sort other than it advertises that it Immediately Establishes a safe bio enviorment, Eleminates Nitrate and Ammonia, "Allows Immediate Introduction of fish*" (This is one im kinda skepticle about)

And would that be safe with the regular chemicles i use to declorinate my other tanks?

 

[Uriel]

Simple answer no it doesn't. You still need to perform a fishless or fish in cycle. Preferably Fishless.

It's a bacteria in a bottle product. not water conditioner.

 

[L4byr1nth]

It's designed as an aid to fish-in cycling. It contains the live bacteria you want in your filter.

I usually use Tetra SafeStart, but the Nutrafin Cycle also came with my new tank (a Fluval Roma 240).

You prepare the tank and condition the water as normal, and then you spend three days dosing the tank with Cycle (or so the instructions say).

I prepared the water, and left the tank for a couple of days. I started adding the Cycle at the same time I put my plants in. After the three days, I began to slowly add fish - starting with a couple of Guppies (prime candidates for Operation: Certain Death - see my thread!).

Do water changes as normal, redosing with the Cycle product as the instructions direct.

Ben.

 

[backtotropical]

As above, Nutrafin Cycle is not a dechlorinator but it is safe to use it in conjunction with dechlorinators.

Cycle claims to contain the bacteria required to cycle your filter, however according to research by Dr Timothy Hovanec, it doesn't do exactly what it says on the tin.

However, it does contain similar bacteria which, although they aren't the correct species for your filter, were found to encourage the growth of the correct species. I can try to find his article if you want to see it, but from memory it's quite hard reading if you're not a scientist.

Whilst many people on here will tell you that Cycle is useless, this appears not to be the case. Whilst I wouldn't expect it to do as much as it claims it does, it will have a beneficial effect on your cycle to some degree, so pour it into the tank rather than down the sink.

However, would I recommend buying it?, absolutely not. A piece of mature filter media from an established tank is 100 times better.

Regards

BTT

 

[L4byr1nth]

FWIW, I've never had any problems setting up tanks the way I described above - and I've never lost a fish in the process.

Even PFK seem to be divided on the issue, as a comment in the December issue described the cycle aid products as 'having come on in leaps and bounds', although they still recommend fishless cycling whenever possible.

If you can get hold of mature media as BTT described, use it as well as the Cycle.

Ben.

 

[Piti]

Yeah I have some mature media I can grab, I will give the cycle a shot and monitor it it very closely with my eyes and the test kit This tank is spelling tons of new things with me. First time sand, bigger tank, bigger plans, and so on so forth. I'll post once ive got everything together.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes BTT, I'm trying to remember (do you remember?) whether Nutrafin Cycle was the one we think Dr. Hovanec consulted on prior to going off on his own? I know that he was involved with one of the bacteria-in-a-bottle products prior, but I just can't remember which one.

I agree with you, absolutely not worth a beginner acually buying one of these (as opposed to being handed one in a starter tank kit, which is how most get them) at this stage of the ongoing research of these products as a simple batch of mature media is 100 times more powerful and we all know that even that can be hit or miss for your cycle (meaning that often a bacteria-in-a-bottle product falls below the radar of any effect you could actually measure or see in terms of speeding anything up.)

So what do we expect to get by pouring in our "Nf Cycle?" Well, if we use it to kick off a Fish-In Cycle, then of course we never know because there's not really enough feedback during fish-in to break the cycle into phases (with fish-in we are tied to maintaining the poisons below 0.25ppm, meaning many water changes and the speed of concentration drop therefor is always being artificially diluted by.. US!) So all we might know is the overall number of days it took to fish-in cycle, but we already know that that varies wildly between 3 weeks and 3 months -without- any products being put in, so in the end we have no experiment, I'd argue.

What if we dose it at the start of a Fishless Cycle? Well, here we get a little more feedback, since we are not doing water changes during the first phase and a half usually, but again the same problem arrises that there's just no control for comparison. We see pretty large variations of overall time of cycle and we have no way of knowing if the Nf was a significant factor. One of the reasons Hovanecs papers were so extremely rare and interesting for us was that as far as I know it was the -only- time anybody has ever published details of running 7 identical tanks at the same time with laboratory control over what went in to them.. we hobbyists just never do that, so unfortunately, by definition, our observations never really rise above the noise level.

~~waterdrop~~