Once again I find my self in the opposite camp of what is posted in the link above about why not to fishlless cycle planted tanks.
To date I have fishlessly cycled about 12 -15 planted tanks. Why am I doing it this way in light of what was posted in that link?
Why bother adding ammonia daily and running all those tests? I don't run the daily tests and very rarely have. I dose the ammonia for a while- a week or so and then I do a few tests. First, I dose the ammonia- and wait 1-2 hours and test for ammonia. If I get a reading over 0, testing is done for a few days when I repeat this process. Once I read 0 on the ammonia test I do a confirming test to insure there are 0 nitrites as well. If they are, cycling is done and a full (or close to full) fish load is added. Dosing the ammonia takes undert 30 seconds, doing the tests takes a few minutes- from start to finish of cycling I might spend a grand total of 10 minutes on testing. All what time?
Why bother building up a large bacteria colony, only for it to reduce once you stop adding ammonia? I am not building up a large bacteria colony. Whatever colony size I do build up will be what is needed to handle what ever portion of the bio-load that the plants don't handle. I am only building up a small colony in fact. I consider the process a mini-cycle as opposed to a full blown fishless cycle that takes many weeks. Planted tanks need a much smaller colony than non-planted.
Why bother running the risk of algae? I have never had any real problems with algae occurring during the mini-cycling period.
Why bother waiting all those frustrating weeks before you get any fish? What frustrating weeks? I have a tank ready to go in anywhere from intantly (with some seeding) or in a very few days. Two weeks is the maximum. Besides, I will never plant and stock without giving the plants a couple of weeks to establish before adding fish, some of which would dislodge plants which have not yet become well rooted or attached. The length of time it takes for any tank to be ready depends on how much seeding I do combined with how many plants I start with. Not all planted tanks are so loaded with plants that no bacteria are needed. In fact most of them are not, imo.
The one thing to note in all this is I do not, nor have I ever, used the dose and test method that requires one reach a given ppm of ammonia. It simply wont work when fishlessly cycling a planted tank. For years I used regular old ammonia with surfactants but nothing else added and then dosed using the original method of drops/10 gallons not the more recent dose to ppm method. Depending on the intended fish load I will dose 5-6 drops of ammonia per 10 gallons of water. Once the tank is cycled, if I can not get fish in immediately, I continue dosing ammonia to hold the cycle pending the arrival of the fish. maintenance dosing is done at 3-4 drops/10 gallons of water. I have held planted (and unplanted) tanks fully cycled without any fish or other critters in them for as many as 4 or 5 weeks. Recently I have switched from store ammonia to ammonium chloride from DrTim. It is formulated so that dosing one drop per gallon should yield 2 ppm of ammonia. This lets me have better accuracy and simplifies dosing but is not essential.
Before folks chime in about not using anything but pure ammonia and that the surfactants are bad, let me ease your concerns. I do two things that makes their use not an issue. First, during the cycling I will do regular large water changes. These are done prior to doing that day's ammonia, so they have no virtually effect on the ammonia levels or mini-cycling process. They do help with any potential buildup of surfactants. Secondly, as the process progresses and I near the end, I will add a big bag of carbon to the filter to help remove them. The final step in this process is not to dose ammonia on the fish arrival day and then to do a massive water change a few hours before the fish are added. This also allows for me to reset the tank temp if needed.
I have never had a problem with losing the fish after adding them and have actually gotten fry in planted tanks I was dosing to hold the mini-cycle. Apparently I moved over plants from other tanks which had eggs on them without realizing this. I have had zebra danios, pseudomugil gertrudae and choprae danios born in tanks being dosed. Of course once I discovered the fry, I stopped the dosing.
In the end any of us will come to use methods which work for us. If you want to set up your planted tank and do no cycling, go ahead, I will do it the way it works for me
Needless to say, i found out it was just sand and now I have an ungodly amount of sand in my tank, and sometimes it will mix, making a gross salt and pepper mixture of sand 
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