Quickie Regarding Fish-In Cycles & Nitrites

[sadguppy]

Hi all,

I have been running a fish-in cycle (bad advice from LFS, not enough prior research, memories of just chucking fish in a bowl as a kid and it surviving for years - you name it) for a month now and everything seems to be going OK - probably because we have been doing a lot of water changes. I have been doing daily tests with an API kit and ammonia never went over 0.5. Nitrites started to show relatively early on in very small quantities, then nitrates again in small quantities.

I thought we were almost out of the woods however now i'm seeing quite a spike in nitrites (up to 2ppm and about a 25-50% change at least once a day) which is a bit confusing as the nitrates are also going up... How long before they start to go down, at a guess? What is going on? I am willing to put the work in but nothing I read explains why this might be happening!

I used Tetra SafeStart to begin with which obviously did not do anything significant - could this have been the cause of the 'mini-cycle' experienced?

I am currently doing a fishless cycle in another tank and it is causing me a lot less stress!
Cheers!

 

[FishFanatic04]

I just went through this too. The nitrites can show up on your Nitrate test so it is misleading. I stopped wasting my nitrate test at that point and didn't start testing nitrates again until the nitrite spike ended. I ended up having to get some mature filter media from a Petco to help, which it did.

But otherwise you just have to keep up with your water changes....Hopefully the nitrite spike won't last too long!

Good news though...once your nitrites go down your cycle is close to being over! good luck!

 

[sadguppy]

Thanks - I only do nitrates every few tests now as i know it doesn't matter as much at the moment, but I didn't know the test could be showing nitrites too. That's interesting!
Thank you, fingers crossed