Cycling Again - Fish In. Advice Needed.

[schmee]

Yesterday:

8am:

NH3 0.50
NO-2 0

70% pwc

NH3 0.50
NO-2

80% pwc

1pm:

NH3 0
NO-2 0
NO-3 0

9pm:

NH3 0
NO-2 0


Today:

9am:

NH3 0.25-0.50
NO-2 0

80% pwc



i'm worried i still don't have nitrites, or haven't had for a while. If there are no nitrites and no nitrates then surely nothing is happening and it's not progressing??

 

[anon02]

Just a novice opinion but,

Maybe the bacterium are taking longer to grow because you have to keep your ammonia levels so low in order to keep your fish alive ?

 

[waterdrop]

Just a novice opinion but,

Maybe the bacterium are taking longer to grow because you have to keep your ammonia levels so low in order to keep your fish alive ?

No, in Fish-In cycling you are only bringing the populations up to meet the exact bioload of the fish that are there. There is actually enough ammonia there even when our test kits read zero ppm to feed the bacteria. It can be confusing trying to compare fishless and fish-in in this regard and its really better not to. Part of the confusion comes from it being hard for us to quite picture what really tiny amounts we are dealing with - there's not actually a whole lot of difference in some ways between 0.5ppm and 5ppm because we're already down in the world of parts-per-million - so there's actually a whole lot of water molecules for the occasional ammonia ion floating about. Its weird because we look at the numbers and say "well, that's 10 times more" but everything we're actually discussing is extremely dilute. In Fishless Cycling, without the bioload being there, we're free to create a really robust biofilter and let the colonies "drop back" to match the bioload size. We actually have, from that point on, a more bullet-proof, if you will, biofilter than we do with fish-in cycling, which will not achieve this tougher quality for a few months on out, I feel. The speed is not really all that different between the two methods, so when we have problems, its often due to other things (things we've overlooked or problems in the filter design or media or something.)

~~waterdrop~~