You'll start by picking an "add-hour" (a particular time out of the 24 hours) such that its a time you can both run your tests and add ammonia if needed AND such that the hour that is 12 hours away from this will be also available for you to test (but not add ammonia) much later in the fishless cycle. Be aware that you only ever add your dose (the one that takes you to 4-5ppm or whatever we have you dosing at the moment) once per day at your add-hour and only if you your ammonia test dropped all the way to zero ppm at some point in the previous 24 hours (got that
) Typical add-hours are 7pm, 8pm, 6am, times like that very often, depending on your life.
Next, its important to keep a daily log, typically in your aquarium notebook or on your computer in a spreadsheet. Ideally, you'll mirror this information in the first post of a "fishless cycling" thread in your name here in our beginners section and you'll give your baseline info (tank volume, tap results... lots of stuff) to kick things off and give everyone all the info in one place. There was a recent guy named Luke I think who had a great template.
The daily entries (at most) are Day# (not date), 12 vs 24 test(not time), Temp, Ammonia, Nitrite(NO2), pH, Nitrate(NO3), water clarity, ammonia added?, observations. Hopefully I didn't forget anything. Now, its important not to think you have to perform -all- these tests all the time, you don't. The members can help you decide what's useful and when. I tend to divide the fishless cycle into 3 phases and that can help with suggestions.
During the first phase you are both waiting for ammonia to drop from 5ppm to zero ppm within a single 24 hours, and you are watching to see some traces of nitrite(NO2) appearing. Obviously you need to be testing ammonia and some nitrite, but you may be able to skip days at first while things are slow. You need off and on pH testing even this early too and the members can help explain that when needed.
The second phase is the "Nitrite Spike" phase where the nitrite readings are too high for the nitrite test to accurately measure. The third phase starts once nitrite finally drops to zero within 24 hours and now you begin hoping for it to drop faster each day until it can drop to zero ppm within 12 hours. Each of the three phases can take 2 weeks but fishless cycles (all cycles in fact) are notoriously unpredictable and vary quite wildly. People naturally make mistakes and this just causes things to be even more varied, thus the style of "handholding" we use here with the fishless cycling thread.
Once both ammonia and nitrite drop to zero within 12 hours you can start your "qualification week" and if you pass that then you can do the big water change and get fish.
~~waterdrop~~
l anyone had this problem and how long do cycles usually take? 6 weeks? 
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