5ppm Of Ammonia = How Many Fish In Inches?

[mnemonik23]

I was wondering how many fish in inches can produce 5ppm of ammonia in 10-12 hours? Of course if there is a way to tell...

This might answer the question if I can do a little bit of overstocking from the very beginning after fishless cycle is done.

Thanks!

 

[Truck]

i dont think there is a way you can tell the only way would be to experiment!

 

[rabbut]

Way more that the tank will take is the short answer. Not even massively overstocked shop tanks produce that much ammonia...

Overstocking from after a fishless cycle is not recomended, not because the filter cannot cope with the load, but because the bacteria colony size is very unstable for the first 6 months, often leading to small ammonia and nitrite spikes. The more fish you have in, the more spikes you will see and the larger those spikes will be. I'd surgest saving any overstocking untill the tank has had 6 months to mature out before starting to push it. Small overstckings can be tolerable if you are on the ball, but you certianly wont realy want to go much over the guidelines untill maturity is reached, even if you are a "seasoned" aquarist.

I've been running tanks for a good while now, and I won't push past 1 inch per gallon (give or take an inch or two) untill 6 months after the cycle has completed, as IMO pushing higher just isn't worth the risk After the tank has matured, pushing to as high as 2 inches per gallon is possible in many cases with smaller fish and good maintanance

All the best
Rabbut

 

[mnemonik23]

That make sense. Every day I learn something new Isn't it great?

Thanks!

 

[waterdrop]

There is no way to tell because individual fish are so variable in amounts of pee But the 5ppm is designed for probably an overstocking that you would not do. BUT, its designed that way for a different reason, the reason being that it can be a bit of a fragile period right when you switch over from using pure ammonia to using fish. The pattern and probably "quality" per se of the ammonia flowing to the bacteria changes at that point from the "pulsed 5ppm pure ammonia" over to the "small continuous" pattern and the bacteria are living things just like fish, so any time you make changes you have the possibility, hopefully remote, that it will affect them.

RDD discussed this quite a bit back when he was designing our Fishless Cycing article. He had to choose a single point along a sliding scale of possibilities. Personally, I think his choices have turned out really well, judging from the successes of so many beginners here over time. His method has you switching over to fish at a point when the colonies are really robust and can handle it, even though they will indeed get significantly more robust over the following six months or even a year.

Personally I don't really think its a great idea to max out the stocking right at first, even though its designed to handle that. My own feeling is that usually there is a sub-population of the chosen community of fish that are thought to be more hardy and by starting with only those, you allow the "big 5ppm" bacterial colonies to only be forced to handle, say, 3ppm and thus the drop back and are even more "robust" for the 3ppm load. (does that make sense I hope?)

~~waterdrop~~

 

[mnemonik23]

There is no way to tell because individual fish are so variable in amounts of pee But the 5ppm is designed for probably an overstocking that you would not do. BUT, its designed that way for a different reason, the reason being that it can be a bit of a fragile period right when you switch over from using pure ammonia to using fish. The pattern and probably "quality" per se of the ammonia flowing to the bacteria changes at that point from the "pulsed 5ppm pure ammonia" over to the "small continuous" pattern and the bacteria are living things just like fish, so any time you make changes you have the possibility, hopefully remote, that it will affect them.

RDD discussed this quite a bit back when he was designing our Fishless Cycing article. He had to choose a single point along a sliding scale of possibilities. Personally, I think his choices have turned out really well, judging from the successes of so many beginners here over time. His method has you switching over to fish at a point when the colonies are really robust and can handle it, even though they will indeed get significantly more robust over the following six months or even a year.

Personally I don't really think its a great idea to max out the stocking right at first, even though its designed to handle that. My own feeling is that usually there is a sub-population of the chosen community of fish that are thought to be more hardy and by starting with only those, you allow the "big 5ppm" bacterial colonies to only be forced to handle, say, 3ppm and thus the drop back and are even more "robust" for the 3ppm load. (does that make sense I hope?)

~~waterdrop~~

It makes perfect sense. I just was confused what mature tank term means. I thought that tank matures after fishless cycle is done... Now I know the answer and will stick to 1" per gallon for now.

 

[waterdrop]

Note that it has been pointed out on TFF (by oldman47 or jonseyUK, can't remember exactly) that even the 1" per gallon type of load has disadvantages. If you get a power outage you have very little safety margin. You will have rather large amounts of ammonia building up rather quickly and your manual efforts to periodically transfer water through your filter will not clear nearly as much ammonia, in fact that will just mostly be about keeping the bacteria alive through the ordeal. The more understocked a tank is, the longer it can make it through an extended power outage when you don't have generators or other backup power. Anyway, that's a caveat to full stocking.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[mnemonik23]

Note that it has been pointed out on TFF (by oldman47 or jonseyUK, can't remember exactly) that even the 1" per gallon type of load has disadvantages. If you get a power outage you have very little safety margin. You will have rather large amounts of ammonia building up rather quickly and your manual efforts to periodically transfer water through your filter will not clear nearly as much ammonia, in fact that will just mostly be about keeping the bacteria alive through the ordeal. The more understocked a tank is, the longer it can make it through an extended power outage when you don't have generators or other backup power. Anyway, that's a caveat to full stocking.

~~waterdrop~~

That's why I have my filter hooked up to 650 VA (390 Watts) UPS, which should keep it running for a while
But you brought a good point. Hmm, now you made me think about my stock options again

 

[Corleone]

I have a 75 minute UPS on my big tank - it's lasted through 5 hour power cuts more than once, and if my math is right, it should be able to handle 24-48 hours before the red light turns on.

People have also suggested using car or deep cycle batteries. You can buy a converter that attaches to a 12 volt battery which will give household equivalent AC power. These are only effective if you're home during the cut and the battery is charged. I do have one of these devices as a fallback in case of an extended power outage.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, doing things with backup power would certainly be a lot more convenient than fooling with the hoses and water! Interesting that you got a nice solid 5 hours out of what sounds like a normal big UPS we'd see on a work computer setup, I've always thought they'd work fine just as you've described. In an earlier thread someone mentioned that they thought computer UPS units were somehow the "wrong load" (they used a different term) for a computer UPS. Don't know what that was all about.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Corleone]

Sounds like rubbish, IMO. The PC plugs into a UPS just like it would into a wall socket - if the power coming out of the UPS wasn't the same as the wall socket, you'd burn out your power supply and wreck your computer. They'll run anything you plug into them, but the insurance policy on them doesn't apply to everything. The only interesting feature on any of them is that many have a port that will connect to the computer by USB or to the network router and can send a suspend command to the computer. This connection doesn't have to be hooked up for it to work, though (usually - research a model before you plop down cash).

UPS are usually rated by a maximum wattage and how many minutes they'll run at that wattage. Filters are much lower wattage than a PC (which can be 200-400 watts, not counting the fact that some monitors are major power hogs).

Very rough estimage, convert the minute rating to hours and multiply by the maximum watts. This'll give you the watt hour capacity. Find out the wattage of your filter motor (should be somewhere in documentation, if not stamped on the filter or on a tag on the power cord), divide the capacity by the wattage of the motor, and you'll have a rough estimate of how long it'll run. Mine works out to around 48 hours, though because UPS aren't meant to run that long, some models may have reliability questions. APC makes a solid product, should be good for the distance.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, lol, I buy lots of APC units at work. Have a brand new one I was just discussing this morning. We are just getting a chance to set it up today on a stand-alone PC tower because yesterday we had a power interruption and the genetics job (the job runs without stopping for up to a year, but usually 6 months, trying to get its results) stopped and will have to be restarted from the beginning, sigh! We hadn't been able to put it on UPS originally, despite knowing it was probably doomed, but now we'll see if we can muck with all the powerchute software and drivers and windows and what not so that the motherboard and hard disk can run as long as possible and/or come back up if there is an interruption. We do research on diseases and there's lots of messing about like this so I always say "if it worked, we wouldn't call it high tech!" Ha!

~~waterdrop~~