6 Weeks And Still No Nitrites

[dazbud]

Hi there,

New to the hobby and a bit confused about the whole cycle business. Not sure if I am doing anything wrong or whether I just need to wait.

Set tank up about 6 weeks ago. Used the aquael bacteria sachet that came with the tank though no fish added at that time.
Had a bacterial bloom after 3 days. Did a couple of 50% water changes and added the plants.
Water was clear after a week.
Added first fish at start of week 2 and have been adding a few each week (on the advice of the pet store)
From week 2 onwards I have been doing 15% water change weekly, and using Seachem Prime in the new water before adding.

Using two different water test kits. strips and API master kit.
My amonia levels are usually 0.25% daily, occasionally go up to 0.5% then drop again. (I understand that Prime detoxifys this anyway)
Nitrites appeared at 0.25% for three days in about week 4. But have never shown again.
I've not seen any nitrate yet.

All the fish seem really happy, swimming, eating and breathing OK, quite a few of them continuously graze on the plants and gravel all day.
no fish deaths or unusual behaviour
Some of the plants have doubled in size.
I'm only really wanting to add a couple more swarf gourami and perhaps a few more neon tetra.

I'm concerned that this far in there is no nitrite or nitrates. Shouldnt the tank be showing some signs of cycling by now considering the number of fish in it?
Have I pushed it too far and just been lucky?

100L tank (70cm x 35cm x 40cm)

Water stats are :
Amonia between 0.25 and 0.5 (tested daily)
Nitrites 0
Nitrates 0
PH 7.6
temperature 25.5C
gets between 4 and 10 hours of flourescent light per day
weekly 15% water change with Prime.
Gravel lightly vaccummed to remove debris

17 assorted small community fish (none over 1.5inches currently, and none with expected size over 3 inches)
4 live plants
2 apple snails - very active
feed daily (different food each day of the week, flake, pellet, frozen, algae wafer)
airstone and fanplus2 internal filter (450 l/hr)with venturi

 

[N0body Of The Goat]

Did you dose the tank upto 4ppm daily before adding the fish?
What plants have you got in the tank and roughly how much of the floor is planted (half, quarter etc.)?

You might be effectively doing a "silent cycle", where the plants are using the fish waste ammonia, rather than having a thriving bacterial population in your filter.

 

[dazbud]

Did you dose the tank upto 4ppm daily before adding the fish?
What plants have you got in the tank and roughly how much of the floor is planted (half, quarter etc.)?

You might be effectively doing a "silent cycle", where the plants are using the fish waste ammonia, rather than having a thriving bacterial population in your filter.

I did try adding a few uncooked prawns in the first week before the fish, but they got a white slime mould. So I took them out when I did the initial large water changes. Amonia didn't peak then either.

The plants are
1 x Hydrocotyle (small foreground)
2 x Cambomba (background)- I had to cut the tops off to make this into 2 as it went from 20cm to 40cm in about 2 weeks)
1 x Heteranthera zosterifolia (I think) - foreground

I have three large resin oranments and quite a few large pebbles. I few fake plants too. So I'd say about 50% of the floor is exposed

 

[fishlove75]

Basically you did not cycle your filter before adding fish. There are 2 methods to cycling a filter, fish in and fishless. You are essentially in a fish in cycle. Basically that means you are going to have to do daily water changes if you don't want to loose any of your fish, and even then you may loose some of them. I personally perfer the fishless cycle. You add ammonia to the tank, do daily water stat checks and wait, kind of boring but you don't have to do any water changes until the end. So much less work for you. Not to say that a cycle with fish in the tank can't be done, just more daily work for you. Essentially you want to check your water stats at a min of once a day, twice a day would be better. Do water changes according to your ammonia level, to save your fish you want it as close to 0 as possible. Once you do a water change you recheck your stats, and you may need to do another one right away.

Here is the link for the beginners resource center it talks all about cycling both with and without fish. Right now you want to focus on the FISH-IN cycling section since that is where you are.

http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?/topic/277264-beginners-resource-center/

Cycling with fish is usually done with so called hardy fish such as zebra danio, but even with these "hardy" fish sometimes they don't make it through the process of cycling. So prepare your self for deaths. If you want you can try to see if the store will take the fish back and you can do a fishless cycle.

Both methods can take some time espically if you don't have mature media (and those little packets are not enough and generally don't work). 6 weeks for a fishin cycle really is not alot of time. You are looking at a few months to fully cycle. If you can find some mature media it will help speed up the process and also help to save your fish.

Also, the live plants I think can mess with eithor your nitrite or nitrate readings, not sure which one, I have never kept live plants, but I remember reading that somewhere on this site.

Best of luck, and check out the link above a lot of very useful information.

 

[dazbud]

Basically you did not cycle your filter before adding fish. There are 2 methods to cycling a filter, fish in and fishless. You are essentially in a fish in cycle. Basically that means you are going to have to do daily water changes if you don't want to loose any of your fish, and even then you may loose some of them. I personally perfer the fishless cycle. You add ammonia to the tank, do daily water stat checks and wait, kind of boring but you don't have to do any water changes until the end. So much less work for you. Not to say that a cycle with fish in the tank can't be done, just more daily work for you. Essentially you want to check your water stats at a min of once a day, twice a day would be better. Do water changes according to your ammonia level, to save your fish you want it as close to 0 as possible. Once you do a water change you recheck your stats, and you may need to do another one right away.

Here is the link for the beginners resource center it talks all about cycling both with and without fish. Right now you want to focus on the FISH-IN cycling section since that is where you are.

http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?/topic/277264-beginners-resource-center/

Cycling with fish is usually done with so called hardy fish such as zebra danio, but even with these "hardy" fish sometimes they don't make it through the process of cycling. So prepare your self for deaths. If you want you can try to see if the store will take the fish back and you can do a fishless cycle.

Both methods can take some time espically if you don't have mature media (and those little packets are not enough and generally don't work). 6 weeks for a fishin cycle really is not alot of time. You are looking at a few months to fully cycle. If you can find some mature media it will help speed up the process and also help to save your fish.

Also, the live plants I think can mess with eithor your nitrite or nitrate readings, not sure which one, I have never kept live plants, but I remember reading that somewhere on this site.

Best of luck, and check out the link above a lot of very useful information.

Thanks for the advice. I am doing daily checks, but amonia is staying fairly static at 0.25%. As I'm using Seachem Prime (which detoxifys the amonia), I assumed that a weekly 15% change would be sufficient. If I started doing daily checks to get rid of the 0.25% amonia, would I not remove all the amonia and leave nothing to be converted to Nitrites?

 

[N0body Of The Goat]

Prime does not permanently lock away ammonia, it is released back into the system to normal levels according to the pH and temp of the tank water.

In your situation, you need to do daily tests and react accordingly when you get anything but zero ammonia or nitrite. If your water is cool and acidic, a reading of 0.25mg/l ammonia is less critical than if your water is warm and alkaline, but basically you would need to dilute that 0.25mg/l by ~3, which means doing a 75% water change each time.

Your Camboba could really help your fish out as it is a fast growing plant, so if you daily dose your tank with a carbon product like Easycarbo and dose daily with a fertiliser like Prolito, this plant will grow like wildfire and use the ammonia as food.

 

[the_lock_man]

Are you seriously shaking the blue-blazes out of the nitrate test bottle 2 (I think, someone correct me if wrong)? There is a powder reagent in this which will give a false zero, if it is not dissolved into the liquid properly. You have to shake that bottle for ages, give it a good old bang on the table, to get the powder dissolved.

If you do this, and then test again, to see if you genuinely have 0ppm nitrate.

If you do have nitrate, then it would seem that your N-bacs colony has grown superquick.

If you don't have nitrate, then I'm stumped, as I would have thought that you don't have enough plants to cycle silently.

 

[fishlove75]

Yes and no, with what you have a fair amount in your tank. The snails alone will be creating a fair amount of ammonia. The Prime is helping definately. But ammonia even at .25ppm is enough to harm a fish. Truthfully 15% water changes even for a cycled tank is not sufficient. The reccomendation on this site (and most of the others) is 20-25% weekly for a health cycled established tank. So right now you are definately under that.

The problem with doing a cycle with fish is you are walking the fine line between trying to grow your bacteria colony and not harming the fish. Yes in theory if you are removing the ammonia every day than you won't have enough to grow your bacteria. But I would bet that if you did a water change in the morning and brought your ammonia down to 0ppm within 12 hours (or less probably) your ammonia level would be back up to 0.25ppm. So you can still grow your colony by doing daily water changes, but it is slower. That is always the case with fish-in cycles, they are slower because you can't allow your ammonia level to get up to high or you will kill your fish.

Here is the direct link for fish-in cycling that explains it a lot better than I ever could.

http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?/topic/224306-fish-in-cycling/

"It is important for your fish’s health, that the ammonia and nitrite levels remain low. These two chemicals are dangerous long-term at any level detectable, but start showing short-term damage above 0.25mg/l, or 0.25ppm" is directly from that page.

So you would probably be ok at 0.25ppm of ammonia short term, but fish-in cycling is not short term. Your fish most likely will become sick if the levels stay at .25 consistently. Additionally, as your ammonia drops, your nitrite levels increase, and there will be a time when you have both low levels of ammonia and low levels of nitrite. Which could also cause problems with your fish.

Again I am not saying it can't be done. My first tank was cycled with fish in because I didn't know about cycling, and all that, and I lost some of the supposed "hardy" fish. I cycled my first 29 gallon with 7 zebra Danio, only 5 survived the cycling process, but out of the survivors, 3 had ongoing issues and were never quite right. Not sure exactly what was wrong with them, but they never seemed to swim right afterwards. They lived another 18 months before they died. But like I said they were never quite right.

It can be done, and I am in now way trying to tell you it can't. Just read the fishin information so you have the knowledge, and watch your fish for any signs of problems. Just educate yourself of what to watch for, and what to do if you run into problems. Fish in cycling has been done for years, and is still the sworn way of cycing a tank by many people.

One thing you might want to try is NITE-OUT II (they sell it at petco and petsmart if you are in the us) It is a "bacteria in a bottle" type product. It isn't going to speed up the process that much (if at all) and you are still going to have to watch, but I did find it worked better as an ammonia remover than prime, and it does help to encourage the growth of bacteria. Just make sure you shake the bottle really well and pour it right onto the filter media itself rather than in the water, I found it worked better if it went directly on the filter media.

And if you do run into problems this site is great, full of experts that are always here to help you out, just don't be surprised if they say you should have done a fishless cycle (it is preferred here)

 

[the_lock_man]

If I started doing daily checks to get rid of the 0.25% amonia, would I not remove all the amonia and leave nothing to be converted to Nitrites?

No you wouldn't. The filter will still cycle even at ammonia levels that measure 0 on our test kits. Fish-in cycling is a slow process if done right.

The snails alone will be creating a fair amount of ammonia.

I disagree.

 

[dazbud]

I tried several bacteria in bottle brands and none worked. I actually persisted for 8 weeks. Then I had a stroke of genius and realised that I'd set up a much smaller table top cold water tank at the same time which had cycled. I took the whole filter sponge out of the small tank, guess there would be enough bacteria left in the small tanks gravel to keep it going, placed it in the larger tanks filter and I got nitrates within 3 days. All fully cycled now. Still no idea why the larger tank never got started on its own though.

 

[OldMan47]

Let me add in here dazbud. It looks to me as if you are running on the initial water conditions in your tank and have been lucky so far, you are not seeing the conditions you would see given your maintenance practices. A constant value of 0.25 ppm ammonia is one that is going to be harmful to your fish in the longer term. Prime will in fact detoxify residual ammonia over the short term but not over any longer term. You need to stop relying on it and do water changes to bring your ammonia levels under control. Advice for the future is simple. Avoid adding any fish at all to your tank and wait until ammonia and nitrite are both being controlled without any water changes at all. I know that is not what you want to hear but it is the most optimistic advice I can give you.

 

[Wandering]

Can you get some mature filter medium from anyone local? You would be welcome to some of mine. Where are you?