Remember, cycling is not something that works on a strict timetable. It is variable. One person has the initial 3 ppm of ammonia gone in a week and for another it takes two.
The biggest issue for folks new to cycling is stalling or killing the cycle. Unknowingly people turn a 5 week (+/-) process into one that can last months. So what I tried to do with the current cycling guide is to prevent the two most common problems encountered during cycling which are both caused by the same thing- adding too much ammonia. If ammonia gets too high it will kill the cycle by harming the bacteria. Given all the problems new fish keepers have to deal with, my goal was to prevent the over dosing of ammonia. The second, and perhaps greater problem is having too much nitrite. This will also harm the bacteria or even kill them.
It is easy to prevent adding too much ammonia. You dose less. And you can make sure of the ammonia levels easily- test. The API ammonia kit goes up to 8 ppm, way more than one should ever have in a fishless cycle. The problem is the nitrite. The API kit does not read high enough. Nitrite should top at a much higher level than the kit can show. But if the kit can't read the level, one is in the dark in terms of knowing where nitrite levels really are.
One can do diluted testing for nitrite, but the average beginner will, more often than not, get things wrong and produce a reading that is useless. Besides, why make things much more complicated than they actually need to be? What I did was to design the fishless cycling method to make it impossible to end up with too much nitrite as long as the directions are followed. This meant the shortcoming of the nitrite test is made irrelevant.
But the above will only work if one follows the directions pretty much as written. They have even been designed to provide a bit of wiggle room to make mistakes. Suppose one measured wrong and was actually adding 4 ppm of ammonia instead of the suggested 3, this should not kill things. The process should work pretty much the same despite this. But if the method started at a 4 ppm ammonia addition instead of 3, and one made a mistake by adding too much ammonia, that would likely mess up the cycle. And just as the amount of the ammonia doses added were designed to prevent overdosing, so also was the dosing schedule. It was designed to prevent any accidental build up of nitrite due to having added too much ammonia.
The rest is pretty easy to keep up- oxygenate the water (i.e. run a decent filter), monitor the pH so it doesn't fall through the floor and make sure the KH is enough to provide the needed inorganic carbon. In most cases, these three things should normally not be an issue, but they could be in some cases, so folks should be aware of them.
And there is one final protection built into the cycling method, and that is to insure, when done, one does not try to overstock. Which is why the directions say you can stock fully to an average fish load for your size tank. Folks are told not to try to stock heavily or to overstock at the outset. This should prevent any mini-spikes from over loading the new tank. But the fact is if one added a few fish to many the tank should catch up to the added load quite fast.
In short, the cycling method was designed to eliminate as much potential for mistakes as possible. It is why the directions give test results levels based on one's using an API kit or one similar and not in the lab scales used by researchers. This is the one used by more members here than any other.
There is only one thing that can not be done to make the whole process a bit easier, and that is the interpretation of the color of test results. This is a subjective process. In a lab setting, where accuracy is critical, the color reading is done by a digital reader rather than a human eye.
