Start Again?

[pops1981]

Hi Guys

Ive been a little impatient and bought some nutrafin cycle before researching it ( not like me).
After about i week of using this, and a bit of research i have established that it has pretty much made no diffrence to the water.
SO now i have decided to undertake to ammonia method of fishless cycling, what i wanted to ask is should i replace all the water in the tank, or just proceed to the cycle. i currently have some "roman gravel" sand type subtrate and a live plant in there, a fluval 4 filter and a heater. Tank is about 2.5 ft by 1.5 ft and about 2 ft high.
Thanks in advance.

 

[m00se]

Just go ahead and cycle it, don't bother changing the water. Generally the opinion about the 'cycle' type products is that, while they don't really do any good, they certainly don't do any harm. It won't impede your cycle, and if by some miracle there were a few bacteria alive in the bottle, then they can only have helped, and changing the water won't get rid of them anyway

 

[glolite]

I think you can just go ahead and add ammonia but take the live plant out as ammonia will kill it. Have you got a pond you can keep the plant in?

 

[m00se]

Just as an aside, I cycled my tank with ammonia full of live plants and they're all going strong. Guess it depends what you have.

 

[OldMan47]

Actually, live plants will make good use of the ammonia in the water, the same way that commercial crops make good use of the gaseous ammonia that the farmers around here use for a nitrogen source for their corn and soybeans. Ammonia is a great fertilizer in small doses and the 5 ppm we use is a fairly small dose for your plants. I set up a summer tub / pond and wanted to get the water nice and green before adding fish. I ran the ammonia up to about 10 ppm when I first set it up and had beautiful green water in 2 weeks. Most of us use plants a little more highly developed than green water algae but they all use nitrogen in about the same way. One of the reasons we often tell people to avoid plants is because they need light, which can grow a lot of algae in a cycling tank, and because it makes it a bit harder to know whether the ammonia is going away because of the plants or because of the bacteria that we are culturing.