Cycle & PH

[karrihug]

this is day 13 of my fishless cycle in my 56 gal. nitrites spiked on day 3 was off the charts till monday 2 on tue 1 on wed .5 thur and .25 today. nitrates were off the charts till I turned my air pump off and now my plants look healthy and the nitrate is <5. gotta love live plants. my problem is that ammonia is still at 2 and won't come down, should i stop adding it? and my ph from the tap is 6.8 to 7, but the new tank is now at 6, all other tanks are right around 7. should i take the bogwood out? or put my tufa stone in? i am putting angels and my pleco in the tank, hopefully tomorrow after water change and testing. but i don't want to have problems cause they are all in the upstairs tank at ph7 now. thanks for any help you can give me.

karri

 

[Tropjunky]

i've never used any shemicals in my cycle. ammonia should not be aded to ur tank. you only need it on day 1 (if ur using it) ammonia just starts the cycle by feeding the bactrial and it sounds like ur doing the equivilant of adding a fish per day. So YES stop adding it.

As for ur PH well it should be adjusted to whatever fish u keep. if most of ur fish like soft acidic water then thats what you wanna have.

 

[luxum]

this is day 13 of my fishless cycle in my 56 gal. nitrites spiked on day 3 was off the charts till monday 2 on tue 1 on wed .5 thur and .25 today. nitrates were off the charts till I turned my air pump off and now my plants look healthy and the nitrate is <5. gotta love live plants. my problem is that ammonia is still at 2 and won't come down, should i stop adding it? and my ph from the tap is 6.8 to 7, but the new tank is now at 6, all other tanks are right around 7. should i take the bogwood out? or put my tufa stone in? i am putting angels and my pleco in the tank, hopefully tomorrow after water change and testing. but i don't want to have problems cause they are all in the upstairs tank at ph7 now. thanks for any help you can give me.

I have fishless cycled before and am doing it again currently. If you want to check to see if your cycle is complete, do a large water change to get rid of excess ammonia/nitrite (test until you get low to moderate testable levels. Then add the daily ammonia dose you've been using and check the levels in 24 hours. If the cycle is established then your ammonia and nitrite will both read zero. If not, then you need to keep dosing until that happens. Don't even bother with the waterchange if you don't have escalating nitrates yet.

Regarding your Ph, it is best to not mess with it unless you are very advanced, water chemistry is tricky and fish do better in stable water than in water that is unstable due to trying to make it "perfect." Keep up with your regular dechlorinated partial water changes and it should be fine. If you are really worried about it, the bogwood is the likely culprit.

 

[karrihug]

my nitrates were off the scale the first of the week, and my plants looked half dead, then i read something about the bubble wall being bad with plants because it diffuses all the co2 so i turned off the air pump to see what would happen. my nitrates started dropping steadily as my plants started looking much perkier. got home today and nitrates are around 5 and plants look fabulous. it is pretty heavily planted, and my other tank which is fully cycled is planted about the same. in that one i never get nitrate over 10.

 

[Sky042]

i've never used any shemicals in my cycle. ammonia should not be aded to ur tank. you only need it on day 1 (if ur using it) ammonia just starts the cycle by feeding the bactrial and it sounds like ur doing the equivilant of adding a fish per day. So YES stop adding it.

As for ur PH well it should be adjusted to whatever fish u keep. if most of ur fish like soft acidic water then thats what you wanna have.

TropJunky What are you kidding me. If you only add ammonia the first day your cycle will never complete. And if you don't like adding any chemicals to your water what exactly do you think fish waste is comprised of? It's ammonia which is all your putting in the tank if you buy the right ammonia its just that ammonia and water it's whats needed if you're going to sucessfully fishless cycle.


Karri your PH drop is to be expected and is a byproduct of the fishless cycle. You can add some baking soda to bring it back up or you can bring it up with the water change. Also make sure you're testing for ammonia 24 hours after adding the last dose. If you add ammonia and then test for it a few hours later you could have an ammonia reading but no nitrite reading.

you don't want to add ANY fish until both your ammonia and nitrite readings are zero and stay zero for 3 days while still dosing your ammonia. Also did you cut back your ammonia dose after the nitrite showed up?

 

[karrihug]

i cut the amount in half when my nitrite spiked. i have continued to add the half dose every evening after checking all my levels. nitrites and nitrated have done exactly what i expected them to do, but ammonia has not really dropped at all and i thought it would drop whem nitrite spiked. and the ph thing really startled me. if my ammonia is not going down where did the nitrite come from?

 

[Sky042]

i cut the amount in half when my nitrite spiked. i have continued to add the half dose every evening after checking all my levels. nitrites and nitrated have done exactly what i expected them to do, but ammonia has not really dropped at all and i thought it would drop whem nitrite spiked. and the ph thing really startled me. if my ammonia is not going down where did the nitrite come from?

Your ammonia level may not be going to zero but it's still being processed. so lets say you add ammonia everyday but your tank remains at 2ppm everytime you test it. That means that some of the ammonia your putting in the tank is being processed and converted to nitrite. Otherwise your ammonia levels would continue to rise higher and higher. What is the ammonia level right after you add your half dose? If it's too high your bacteria bed may not be able to completely digest 100% of the ammonia in 24 hours. Also it sounds like you're checking your water just before adding more ammonia which is good. the PH thing is a byproduct of ionic emmisions from the nitrifying bacteria nothing to be scared about though you may want to correct it. Also you could raise the tank temp to ~84f to help speed the process of bacteria growth.

 

[karrihug]

thank you so much sky042, the ammonia didn't make sense, everything i read said it should be zeroing out when the nitrite spiked and i was confused. and the ph thing really scared me cause i don't want to get stuck having to mess with it forever, my angels have been living happily with my ph at 6.8 to 7 which is what my tap water is and it was so low i was afraid i might have to figure out how to lower it everytime i did water change. i am not that brave as i have heard it is very dificult to keep it steady if you mess with it.