But, I live in the UK and have kept fish for around 7 years and currently have 2 tanks 34 gals in total with over 30 fish and have never cycled either of my tanks.
The term "cycled" means you have sufficient beneficial bacteria in your tank to keep down the nitrite and ammonia. Since your fish are alive and healthy whether you consciously "cycled" your tank or not, I assure you your tank is cycled. I presume you have hardy fish who survived the initial cycling process and probably you did regular water changes that helped.
I have only ever left a tank with the filter running for 1 week before introducing fish ...a few at a time.
That is the traditional way of cycling a tank, whether you called it that or not. However, it is risky, particularly with more delicate fish.
Ive never added any chemicals with the excepting of some fin repair on a fish that had been bullied. no anti chlorine stuff or anything.....
In UK water companies have been traditionally cautious about using disinfectants such as chlorine and chloramine. However, times are a changing and we've had several Brits on this board lose fish due to chlorine or chloramine in their water (invariably they've forgotten to dechlorinate or their dechlorinator wasn't up to the job). Our water isn't as good as it always used to be.
and to date Ive never lost a fish to illness.......a few have been eaten but thats the way it goes but all my fish are happy with what comes straight from the tap.
I'm glad your fish have done fine. However, how exactly does one tell a "happy" fish?
I have had friends who have tried setting up tanks and done it "by the book" with total failure...lost fish within weeks.
What book was that? Incidently, fishless cycling isn't in most books because its a new method, largely devised on the Internet. The books I have describe cycling exactly as you have done - adding fish very slowly, minimal feeding, frequent water changes etc.
Maybe I'm just lucky?....I do spend at least 1/2 hour a day doing something on my tanks and I keep the filters really clean once a fornight and I rotate this with interim gravel and glass cleaning. I think fish are hardier than they are given credit for.
Your fish are obviously quite hardy and you are obviously diligent about water changes and keeping the filters clear. I'm not dissing your obvious expertise - that isn't "luck", that's hard work. However, many newbies get far too many fish (usually due to bad advice from LFS's), don't do enough water changes, have inadequate filtration and lose a lot of fish before they learn better.
But you have matured tanks and that's all that cycling is really - maturing a tank. You don't need to do fishless cycling because your tank is already well and truly cycled, and the health of your fish shows that it works. If you were to start another tank no doubt you'd "seed" it from another established tank and probably wouldn't even think that this was "fishless cycling". However, that would be just what it is.
I still believe it is a welfare issue - when we knew no better, then cycling with danios or whatever was the only way to go, but now we have this method (Fishless Cycling) we don't need to cause fish to suffer at all.
However, there is another issue: our day and age is one of instant gratification. We could try advising newbies to add a couple of new fish every 6 weeks but would they do that? Probably not. They'd probably keep trying to push the limits and we'd still have the posts from newbies with over-stocked, un-cycled tanks, desperate to know what to do to save their fish.
