For my cycling, hope ive been given the right info, i got a used filter off my sister cut it to size and put in my filter box, been putting i small amount of fish food in the tank, apparently this brakes down to ammonia, ive been doing this for a week on wednesday, then i was goin to take a sample to lfs after 2 week of this, but looking to get my own kit now.
Is this ok?
In "fishkeeper" terms, you seeded (added media from an established filter) the new filter and now you are feeding the bacteria (ammonia is food for nitrifying bacteria). The basic idea is completely right, but I can suggest a few improvements…
Firstly, you can use pure household ammonia instead of fish food (available online from Boots, for example), which means that you will not need to do a mega clean before adding the fish *and* you would know exactly the quantity of ammonia that you are adding. The problem with using fish food is that it will get in the gravel and will rot there very slowly, so you will need to do a full gravel clean (which I do not even do for most maintenance) and that the amount of ammonia that is released as it rots is a bit erratic and unmeasurable.
Secondly, if you test your tank water every 1-2 days for the duration of the cycle (you will need to test it every day for the qualifying week), you can estimate when it should be complete, can see when there are likely to be problems, can see if you are feeding the bacteria enough and generally keep an eye on things. A reading after two weeks will not really tell you where in the cycle you are, as you will not have any readings to compare to.
For a single Betta, I expect around 1-3 ppm of ammonia in 30 litres per 12 hours to be enough. Since you seeded your filter and will have a low bio-load, the cycle should take 3-5 weeks including the qualifying week, but the only way to check this is to keep track of what is happening with ammonia and nitrite.
