Stalled Cycle

[scrapps]

So I restarted my fishless cycle after the first time not going well. I splurged on an external filter, got different ammonia and changed my substrate to sand for my cories. I also threw in some amazon swords I bought in the hope to kinda seed the bacteria. Everything was going wonderfully, my ammonia dropped to almost zero in about a week and I got a nitrite spike a few days later. I initially started with 2ppm ammonia and then slowly bumped it up to 4ppm when it was going through the 2ppm in 24 hours.

It's now been a little over 2 weeks (I started on 8/24) and yesterday I noticed that my ammonia level was a tad greener then .25 but not the next shade. I attributed this to not having my light on and that maybe the little remaining ammonia would normally be used by the plants or something, so I boosted it back up to 4ppm. Today when I checked the ammonia it hadn't changed at all and was still at 4ppm. So I checked my pH and it was around 6.4 (my tap being 8.0).

I'm at a loss of what to do. The only thing I've added to the tank other than ammonia has been some de-chlorinated water to top off what evaporated.

 

[OldMan47]

Do a large water change and pick back up. A cycle will stall if you let the pH get that low. By doing a water change it will return to near tap water pH and you should be able to pick up where you left off.

 

[scrapps]

Awesome, thanks! I was considering doing a water change as I knew that the low pH could mess things up, but wasn't sure if doing so would change anything (or screw things up.)

 

[Amunet]

*points* Totally what Oldman has suggested.
We had this happen to us. Our waters pH crashes. Straight out of the tap it's 7.5, but leave it in the tank for a day it crashes to below 6. We didn't know what the heck was going on until someone told me that low pH can cause the beneficial bacteria to stall/stop.

Since doing water changes for us was useless, I have to resort to adding baking soda to our tanks.
Hopefully you won't have this problem though and a water change will fix your problem.
Good luck and hope your tank continues to cycle as normal!

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, completely agree. A water change should do it. You are lucky in that your tap has pH 8.0 and the beneficial bacteria like 8.0-8.4 supposedly. If you then just test for pH each day and get a feel for when and how fast it drops, you may get by without having to worry about baking soda etc.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Amunet]

Yes, completely agree. A water change should do it. You are lucky in that your tap has pH 8.0 and the beneficial bacteria like 8.0-8.4 supposedly. If you then just test for pH each day and get a feel for when and how fast it drops, you may get by without having to worry about baking soda etc.

~~waterdrop~~

Yeah, baking soda is kind of a last resort so try everything else before thinking about using it.

 

[scrapps]

I did about a 50% water change last night and about an hour later my pH was at about 7.4. I didn't add any ammonia as I figured it might be better to just let the what was in there get processed and see what my pH was today. My pH is still the same and the ammonia was all processed today. Added more ammonia and will continue testing pH daily.

Luckily pH is an easy test!

Thanks everybody.

 

[waterdrop]

Sounds good, but be aware that smaller percentage water changes have little meaning or benefit when you are fishless cycling (people think like that because they are thinking about what is good for fish, forgetting that right now they need to be doing what is good for bacteria!)

So, for instance, in your case, since your tap water tests up at 8.0, you could really change out as much as possible to get the pH as high as possible from the high tap water reading. You could either shut the filter down and change out all the way down to the gravel or if its more convenient you could just go down to the lowest level that would allow the filter to keep running (assuming the intake pipe is pretty low and that that gives you a pretty big water change.)

The fact that your pH crashed may be due only to the cycling process itself (it does that) or it could be that you have very low KH (carbonate hardness, aka temporary hardness), in which case the pH will drop rapidly again and you will find you need more frequent water changes. If it turns out to be extreme, you may need to seek advice here about using baking soda to help the process, but don't worry about that until there are more signs you need it.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[scrapps]

Well I only did the 50% change because it was an hour before I needed to go to bed, so I wanted to be able to take a pH reading before going to sleep. If it drops again I plan to do a larger change, but it was so late at the time and 6 hours of sleep doesn't really agree with me.

Today when I did my pH test it was higher (7.6, it may have been higher but I wasn't worried enough to do the high pH test.) I've been meaning to pick up a KH test, as the API kit doesn't come with one for whatever reason, so I'll pick one up next time I'm at the fish store.