Not The Usual Fishless Cycle Q

[flash22]

hi Girls, Guy's and those not quite sure............................lol

I having some strange test results while re-cycling my ehiem pro 2 2028 on my Juwel Rio 300 . due to various problems i ended up stripping my rio 300 down what took me 6 hours the filter had mature Media what was swaped out of my pro 2 2026 what i had on another tank when i first set up the tank anyhoo

I managed to get the tank up and running under the six hours, water declorinated and all that and dosed up with ammonia to give the bacteria something to munch on to see if i could save it

Its taken about a week but the ammonia is dropping in 8 hours (5ppm to nothing) nitrite is 0 and has been for the the last week and the nitrate has gone from 10 to 40-50ppm

The thing i cant get my head around is there hasnt been a nitrite spike but i am getting nitrate.

Btw. I am using a Api Master test Kit and had the water double checked at the lfs



All i can think is that I managed to salvage some of the bacteria by adding the ammonia (media was in water in the filter all the time). I Have cycled up 10+ tanks over the last few years and this has got me stumped

 

[minxfishy]

Sounds like the N-bacs survived the dismantling process better than the A-bacs, so whilst it took a couple of days for the ammonia to spike and the bacteria to build up enough to cope with it, the n-bacs coped with the move about and happily processed the extra without spiking.

If the ammonia is processing that quickly and your nitrAtes are rising, then IMO the tank is cycled again and your good to go.

 

[flash22]

thanks minxy

It was just throwing me a bit going to dose with ammonia another week or so just to make sure. Then stock very slowly this time it hurts too much loosing fish let alone the pocket.

got my black widow tetras,flag cichlids,1 gold ram and 1 angel in another tank at the mo. oh and 2 clown loaches but think i will wait a while to add them

 

[minxfishy]

If you stock too lightly at the end of the cycle, you know that the bacteria will die back to only cope with the amount of waste those few fish will produce right? So yes, after the initial stocking, then stock slowly to allow the bacteria to mutliply again.

Although the bacteria should be established enough to multiply fairly quickly when you add more fish.

Hope it turns out better this time for you