My First Tropical Tank

I've got a 54 litre tank running with some Amazon Sword and Echinodorous planted, have noticed a few snails knocking around and have also added some food pellets to allow them to rot. The filter has been running for 11 days now and I did my first water test on Saturday night, I was very excited to discover that my Ammonia was at 1ppm. So I will keep testing each night from now on and hopefully within a couple of weeks I'll be ready to get some fish in there.

I guess my main question is, am I going to have problems completing the cycle this way without using ammonia? I don't seem to be able to find any in shops here in Dublin and I guess I like the idea of it being totally natural at the same time.

redmonk said:

I've got a 54 litre tank running with some Amazon Sword and Echinodorous planted, have noticed a few snails knocking around and have also added some food pellets to allow them to rot. The filter has been running for 11 days now and I did my first water test on Saturday night, I was very excited to discover that my Ammonia was at 1ppm. So I will keep testing each night from now on and hopefully within a couple of weeks I'll be ready to get some fish in there.

I guess my main question is, am I going to have problems completing the cycle this way without using ammonia? I don't seem to be able to find any in shops here in Dublin and I guess I like the idea of it being totally natural at the same time.

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Edit:

Also, that rotting food that you are leaving around is the catalyst for snail overload ! , they MAY breed like crazy... but if you're happy with that, then so be it.



Good afternoon redmonk. It is widely recommended that the use of household ammonia is the best tool for getting those bacteria growing in a fishless cycle, seeming as you are obviously prepared to wait ( ) then i would also recommend so.
I started the fishless cycle in my 30L tank using a little flake every day for about 10 days, until i had the time to go out and find some pure household ammonia (i used a small, 'express' version of Boots, still see it in there today) putting enough in there as to be feed the amount of fish i was hoping to home.. I have read instances of people getting it online (i'm sure someone can reply with a possible vendor) or from local gardening centres.
Best of luck with everything though and well done..you obviously seem to have done your basic research.

Terry.

The very first fishless cycle I did (well, the only fishless cycle I ever did, lol) 20+ years ago was with fish food.

It's perfectly possible and will run through the same stages as a cycle done with household ammonia. The main difference, I think, is that you'll probably never get the ammonia up to 3 or 4ppm, so your initial stocking will have to be lighter, and it may run a bit slower, apart from that there won't really be much difference.

Same here - I cycled my tank with fish flake without any problems

Thanks a lot for the replies, I am delighted to hear that I can stick at the more natural process and be successful. I have been offered an external filter (Eheim 2215) and I am going to add this to the tank over the weekend, with a view to it giving me some redundancy and also allowing me to add a second tank in future more easily. That should be fine right? I figure it might be a lot of filter for a two foot tank but shouldn't do any harm.

I tested the water last night for Ammonia and it was down at 0.5ppm, so I will retest each evening this week and see what kind of progress I make.

Could use some advice today, I did some water tests last night and then got a bit over enthusiastic!

Tests came out as follows:

Ammonia 0.25ppm, this was down from 1ppm 24 hours previously.
Nitrite was off the chart
Nitrate was at 0ppm.

So this was all looking good and I figured that things were progressing, for whatever reason, in my wisdom I decided to clean out some of the rotting pellets that looked VERY rotten at this stage thinking that it might make sense not to let them completely decompose into the substrate. So I've added more pellets now, but my concern is I might have removed a lot of the ammonia and will kill off my bacteria.

Does anyone else think that's very likely or am I just panicking? I'll do a set of tests tonight when I get home from work to check.

your bacteria will be fine, it doesnt actually die it just goes into a null state but while ammonia is present, it will still be feeding. The new pellets will rot soon enough.

Great thanks very much for the quick response, was worried I might have set myself back to square one.

note that there's little which is "unnatural" about using bottled ammonia - the fish excrete it all the time It does however allow you to be more precise about the dosing etc than using fish food / rotting shrimp etc