Fish For A New 48Litre Tank

[chrisbassist]

Ph is great forvthe cycle, but you may want to take it into account when deciding on fish

and yes, just test every day or 2. One it reaches 0 top it up again.

Once it's clearing all the ammonia and all of the nitrite (produced while processing the ammonia) in 12 hours you're ready to add fish.

People here will also say about a qualifying week, where you add ammonia every day and check that it's cleared after 12 hours each day. Just to make sure the bacteria are really there and it wasn't luck.

As the cycle goes on you'll need to step up to daily, then finally every 12hours on your testing. But for now you should be ok every couple of days.

 

[Twinklecaz]

Lol Chris, that's one of the simplest and clearest summaries of the cycle I've ever seen!

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome to the fiorum Singy.
OK, here we go. A concentration of 8 ppm or more in your tank will favor development of the wrong kind of bacteria in your filter. Although the wrong kind will indeed remove ammonia, the ones we want to thrive are the ones that do well with almost no ammonia concentration. Those bacteria cannot compete with the other bacterial species at more than about 5 ppm of ammonia. That is the main reason that we recommend a starting ammonia level of 5 ppm. In reality, until we are near the end of our fishless cycle, a concentration of as little as 2 ppm is plenty. As we near the end of the fishless cycle, we like to monitor the ability of the colony to process 5 ppm of ammonia to be sure that colony can handle anything we throw at it. With a level of 8 ppm of ammonia, I would suggest an immediate water change of about 50% of the water. That should put you back into the 4 to 5 ppm range which will work out better in the long run.

 

[singy]

Hi All,

My ammonia level came down from 5mg/l down to 0.1mg/l today, so I have now added some more ammonia. Also my Nitrate level seems to be around 50-60ppm.

Mark

 

[waterdrop]

OK, looks like the fishless cycle is now progressing correctly for its starting period. Nice work Mark.

Chris, one thing to always keep in mind with pH is to not let your fishless cycling "tank pH" measurements be necessarily used in your mind for planning the running of the tank in the future with fish. Ammonia is a mild base and will usually raise the pH some when added. The tap water pH is a better starting point but even this can vary some with CO2 gas off and conditioner treatments etc. (although most of the time those won't be a big factor and usually any old tap water pH test will get your future thinking in the right ballpark.) And of course there's still the one pretty much everyone knows about, that the cycling process itself will bring a strong possibility of large pH drops once the buffer is used up, so that too is a stong factor for misleading people about their future pH when they have fish later.

WD