Aquarium Cycle - Graphical Log With Updates

[norite]

Hi everyone!

I'm in the process of setting up my 120 liter aquarium. I'm not new to marines, having kept them for a 2 year period about 15 years ago (no live rock back then...it was all undergravel filtration! )

Now I'm back, and really getting into this live rock thing

I thought it would be interesting to post the results of my tanks water chemistry, as the rock cures. I'll be testing the water daily, and updating the graph below every few days. I hope this gives a nice graphical example of how a new tank cycles. I've never used live rock before, so I'm interested too! I started off with 5kg of live rock last Thursday, and I'll be getting another 10kg of live rock this Friday...

Here are the test results so far:

A couple of shots of my tank:

I hope you find this useful!

 

[SkiFletch]

Oooh nice, I'll be following this with great interest . Your ammonia spike is higher than what's typically reported. Where is the rock coming from?

 

[Danno]

That is a crazy good idea for the chart! Your 10kg Live-Rock day is creeping up!

 

[norite]

Oooh nice, I'll be following this with great interest . Your ammonia spike is higher than what's typically reported. Where is the rock coming from?

The rock is Pacific; it was sitting in the lfs tanks for 4 days before I got it, so not fully cured, not by a long chalk. It was cleaned tho. . My ammonia kit goes from 2ppm to 4ppm, so it's all a bit subjective and woolly, especially since I'm trying to compare colours. much rather shove the sample through a mass spec, but who can afford that?

I'm interested to see what'll happen after the 10kg of LR is addded...

 

[norite]

Todays update...Ammonia falling, nitrite rising....woohoo...! The ammonia seems to have fallen quite rapidly....

 

[SkiFletch]

3 cheers for the ocean

 

[norite]

18 hours after I added 10kg of LR, here are the results:

Ammonia and Nitrite have spiked again, as expected. Nitrates have jumped too. I'm mostly worried about the pH....it.s dropped to 7.8 It always was on the low side, at 8.1

 

[norite]

I've added another 3.5kg of LR - and this will be the last bit of LR. It smells of fresh ocean, so it's mostly cured (I hope!) I needed a little more to finish off the top of my wall of rock.
This is what the tank looks like now:

And todays readings:

 

[Underwurlde]

Nitrate spike BEFORE Nitrite (or is that just me misinterpreting the vertical scale)....

weird!

 

[norite]

I'm pretty sure that's my fault - I didn't have any RO water, so I used a few litres of mineral water to keep the tank topped up - unfortunately it had 20ppm nitrate in it...! Doh! I have a nice stock of RO water now, so that'll never happen again.
Interesting (and nice!) to see the nitrate level falling tho...

 

[Underwurlde]

unfortunately it had 20ppm nitrate in it...! Doh!

Ah.
Hmmm.

I hope you havn't just stuffed your lovely graph up.... (better add that occurence as an 'event' on the horizontal scale then).

 

[norite]

Yeah. I know. I've beaten myself with a big stick over such a stupidly dumb mistake. I hope the nitrate levels fall to zero, and stay there!

I'm still concerned about the pH. my dKH levels are at 10. the guy at the lfs reckons it's probably due to the sudden and massive biological load that's been placed into the tank, as the 10kg of LR cures, and that it *should* recover. The skimmer certainly has been pulling a lot of gunk out of the water!

 

[Underwurlde]

I think (note the word think) that pH levels will be up & down all over the place during cycling (and hence during this period can be pretty much ignored).

Andy

 

[norite]

Hmmm. I've had another think. I put about 3.5 litres of mineral water in the tank, the level of nitrates for this mineral water was 20ppm per litre, so i put in 20ppm * 3.5 = 70ppm nitrate into 100 litres of tank water, so that dilutes to 70/103.5 = 0.67ppm...

Yet my nitrate readings have shot up to 10 ppm. Either that mineral water has a heck of a lot more nitrates in it, my nitrate test kit is dodgy (or being interefered with by the nitrite levels) or the biological cycle has kicked off really quickly....

 

[Danno]

Maybe you added too many drops of a test solution to the sample water?