Starting Fishless Cycle.

[shm_yellow]

Hi all, today is the day I start my fishless cycle.

Tank is 48 x 10.5 x 17 inches. Volume 140 litres.
2 x Maxijet 600 Powerheads and undergravel filtration system.
Couple of ornaments, a bubblemaker, 1 live plant and 1 piece of bogwood.
Heater set to 29 degrees celcius.

Tap water pH was 8.0-8.2.

Found some ammonia which is 9.5% ammonia solution? from Rockfields DIY and added around 7ml.

First ammonia reading is 4ppm.

Still trying to locate some mature tank media... is bogwood or an ornament ok?

If theres anything I have forgotten to do, or if i have done something wrong can someone please let me know? As this is the first tank I have set up in years.

Thanks all

 

[fluttermoth]

Media is something from inside a filter; could be sponges or ceramic noodles or even filter floss. Water, gravel or ornaments from a mature tank won't do anything to help you, it must be something from the filter.

 

[waterdrop]

Make sure your gravel is flat and even across the entire surface area of the bottom. For a UGF it needs to stay flat. Another thing/skill you're going to need is a way to suck debris from underneath the UGF plates. This can be done with a straight siphon hose that has no gravel cleaner on the end or one with a very narrow gravel cleaner. You clear the gravel away from a above one of the UGF plates and then hold the siphon up against the slits in the plate and hopefully see brown debris being sucked out through the clear hose (this is for later btw and assumes fish have been in long enough to create some debris!) In a UGF the gravel will serve as both the biological and the mechanical filtration media. The bacteria will be like a brown stain on the gravel and the debris will need to be kept out of the gravel so that efficient mechanical filtration can continue to happen.

~~waterdrop~~