Another Newby

peo

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Firstly let me say hello and what a informative site you have here.Ive been around for a few weeks now picking up hints and tips.Im setting up a tank in a couple of weeks after a few years of not having one there are a few things that i cant quite get my head around the main one is the fishless cycle and why this has to be done.When i set mine up i will be using bottled water as i have done in the past but will i need to do this fishless cycle ?
 
Forgot to mention the tank is SH and already has fish in
 
Cycling (fish-in or otherwise) is the process of allowing a colony of bacteria to grow in the filter. These bacteria process ammonia, which fish release from their gills, and which is produced as fish poop, uneaten food, or any other organic waste in the tank breaks down. Ammonia is very deadly, so it can turn water very toxic very quickly if not dealt with.

These bacteria themselves produce nitrIte, which isn't as toxic as ammonia, but still not great - it binds to hemoglobin and effectively suffocates fish, no matter how much oxygen is available. The second part of the cycle promotes the growth of a second type of bacteria, which process nitrIte into nitrAte, which is harmless in controlled amounts - generally, water quality will go bad in other ways like a pH crash before nitrate itself becomes an issue.

With both ammonia and nitrIte, any amount over 0 is bad, anything over 0.25 ppm is cause for immediate concern, and anything over 0.50 ppm can cause immediate harm to most fish. Prolonged exposure even to trace levels is stressful, but even short term exposure to elevated levels can cause permanent gill damage and black chemical burns on the fish's skin.

Now, specifically for fishless cycling, we use a purified ammonia source (or failing that, rotting fish food or cocktail shrimp - there's a nigh-legendary story floating around about one man who successfully did one using measured doses of his own urine) to simulate a fish load during this process. There's no fish in the tank to worry about, so we can let water quality decline as far as it will without worry. When fish are added to an uncycled tank, the water quality has to be closely monitored, and water changes have to be done to protect the fish from their own waste products. Some people have come to this forum with ammonia in excess of 8.0 ppm within a week of setting up an uncycled tank. These levels are fatal within hours to some fish, and few of the hardiest fish in the hobby can last more than a day or two exposed to them.

Bottled water is pretty bad for keeping fish. There's two main types of bottled water: The kind with way too much mineral content, and the kind with almost none. In the latter case, it tends to create a very unstable pH. The pH in the tank generally wants to drop - acidic byproducts of the nitrogen cycle bacteria eat away at the carbonate hardness almost always present in tapwater - when this hardness is eliminated, the pH can drop very far, very quickly.

Except for a short list of highly sensitive species, and breeding of soft water fish, a pH anywhere from 6 to 8 is ok. Fish will tolerate a stable pH well outside their ideal range much better than they'll tolerate a fluctuating pH in their ideal range. Most of the time, dechlorinated tapwater is ideal. In the few cases where hardness or pH has to be tinkered with, purified water and pH altering chemicals are generally inadvisable, as both tend to create pH swings, rather than the stable pH you're aiming for.
 
If the tank is second hand and it already contains fish you might not need to cycle it, as the fact that the fish are in it and healthy and not all dying like flies (well I presume they aren't dying like flies) means that it must already be cycled. However, if it contains less fish than you intend to keep in it, you will need to add fish slowly at a rate of one or two per week until you've fully stocked it. The bacteria in the filter that process waste are there, but if you add all the new fish at once, there will not be enough bacteria to process all the fish waste. Adding fish one or two at a time allows the filter to slowly build up to coping with the waste.

If you tell us how big the tank is and what's in it (which species and how many) we'll be able to help you decide what, if anything, you want to add to it (and also give you help moving it if you want, because moving an already set up tank is not easy unless it's very, very small).
 
LaraFrog brings up a good point - provided the filter media didn't dry out, the tank is probably still cycled (or close to it) if that's the situation.

Either way, you definitely want a test kit - that and a siphon are the most powerful tools in a fishkeeper's arsenal, and a set of water readings will tell at a glance if the tank is cycled or not.
 
Thanks for the information,ive kept tropicals before but i never had to do all this it was just a case of set it up and intrduce the fish you live and learn
 
When we did it that way, I did it too Peo, we used to get some goldfish or similar and not worry too much about how many died the first few weeks because we wouldn't keep them anyway. They were after all only feeders. You always lost some and wrote it off to having bought cheap weak fish. By the time most of the goldfish were dead or very unhealthy, you would get something almost as tough like a few guppies. Some, but not all, of those would actually survive. By the time you stopped losing guppies you might try some other cast iron fish like a couple of platies or a few zebras. At that point, or a little after, we had a cycled tank but never called it that. We had done a fish-in cycle and disposed of dead fish instead of doing a ton of water changes. Now that the process is better understood, we avoid all the dead fish and just kill a little ammonia to cycle the filter. It is easier, more humane and even quite a bit cheaper than replacing all the fish.
If you have fish in a tank that needs cycling, there is a writeup you can get to from my signature for a fish-in cycle. If you have an empty uncycled tank, there is another link in my signature to a thread that talks about how to go fishless. Both are quite thorough enough to give you a good start. Once you have read through them, come back and we would be happy to answer any questions you still have.
 

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