Am I doing this right?

[Danny Boy]

My fishless cycle appears to be going well...I just need to check I'm doing this ok.

We're now in week 2, having initially bumped the ammonia up to 4ppm and waited for nitrite before adding any more.

My question is...there now seem to be enough bacteria to deal with 2ppm of ammonia in 24hrs, do I'm dayly dosing the tank to keep it at 2ppm of ammonia.

Is this the wrong thing to do? I don't seem to have dropping nitrite levels yet, so I'm wondering if I'm overburdening the nitrite feeding bacteria with the amount of nitrite being produced by the other fellas feeding off the ammonia with the amount I'm putting in...

Or, should I just keep doing what I'm doing, and wait?

 

[jmkgreen]

You will need to keep the ammonia bacteria fed somehow while the nitrite bacteria develops. If your tank is getting rid of 2ppm of ammonia in 24 hours, I'd say keep going. With my cycle, Ammonia was between 1-2ppm, Nitrites went up to 3-5ppm and took nearly a week to zero-out. I kept some prawns in the tank throughout and used Stress Zhyme.

 

[rdd1952]

You are doing it correctly. You have to keep adding the ammonia to keep those bacteria fed. Since the ammonia ends up becoming nitrite, that is the reason it takes longer for the nitrite spike to drop than it does the ammonia spike. You should be done soon. It usually takes about twice as long for the nitrite to drop as it did the ammonia.