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Fishless Cycle Log

Bunch of days updated at the top (now up to day 79).

Got an order of Seachem plant fertilizers in the mail today: Excel, Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium. The plants have been hanging in there but not growing (with the exception of the hygro which has also sprouted roots from its stems) so the new ferts should help that.

Nitrates seemed lower today; I guess the 50% water change helped that but I have not seen it this low since the beginning when the nitrates were just starting to show up. Now if the ammonia would just process like it should!
 
Day 81 is updated and all sorts of interesting stuff is going on.

The water is starting to exhibit a faint cloudiness. It take this to mean I am starting to experience a bacteria bloom. Isn't it odd that this would be happening now?

Also interesting (and I use that term loosely) is the sudden return of nitrites. For the past couple of weeks it has been zeroing out after 24 hours, while the ammonia has been present. Now the ammonia is zero and the nitrites are around 1.0. Is this linked with the bloom? Or the new fertilizers? To add insult to injury I have seen the biggest pH crash since I started this biology experiment.

What the hell is going on??? ????
 
Well congrats, you now have about the second worse looking time for fishless cycling in recent memory (search for a thread by a guy by the member name of martinking - 127 days) and I can't see why, as you've done most everything right from what I've seen. Maybe OM will come along and think of some new question...

Meanwhile it looks like your pH has dropped significantly, so you might consider a largish water change with a recharge of ammonia and a dosing of baking soda (1 tablespoon per 50 liters) and perhaps that will get the attention of those little guys.

By the way, did you get a bottle of "trace" (or already had traces) to go along with your macroferts and Excel?

~~waterdrop~~
 
waterdrop said:
By the way, did you get a bottle of "trace" (or already had traces) to go along with your macroferts and Excel?

~~waterdrop~~
Click to expand...

Day 83. Week 12 eve.

Did a fairly large water change today, syphoned up some algae and snail poop, cleaned the glass. The water is nice and clear now (didn't really get cloudy - just a tad).

Nitrites were VERY high on day 82 (+5.0) but has come down to 1.0 today (still unacceptable).

Plants are growing. Slowly. Waterdrop: I have a bottle of Seachem Flourish: Comprehensive Supplement for the Planted Aquarium. Is this the same as Trace? It's the only Seachem fert I can buy locally.
 
Yes, I have a bottle of the "general Flourish" (which has macros plus traces) but I've been running my own little experiment for quite a while now and I've decided it is definately inferior to doing the "whole bit" with all 5 bottles: Excel, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium and the bottle that just straight Trace. For me, its gone better using the 5-bottle approach rather than the 2-bottle approach (general Flourish plus Excel.) It took rather a lot of calculations using the concentration figures on the bottles and the info pinned in the planted forum to figure out my little daily dosings. K goes in in a little larger amount, N is quite a bit smaller, P is even smaller than N. Excel goes in every day but the others go in in a pattern across the week and you can learn which plant problem symptoms mean to tweak which nutrient. I'm not very good at that but I'm working at it. If you decide to try the use of the separate macro-nutrient bottles (I realize you'd have to order them in) you could still use up the "general Flourish" just treating it basically as "Trace" but lessening your individual macros a tiny bit I suppose. All of this is mostly unnecessary in low-light situations but you can see differences and for me its just an interesting bit of entertainment playing at it.

~~waterdrop~~
 
waterdrop said:
If you decide to try the use of the separate macro-nutrient bottles (I realize you'd have to order them in) you could still use up the "general Flourish" just treating it basically as "Trace" but lessening your individual macros a tiny bit I suppose. All of this is mostly unnecessary in low-light situations but you can see differences and for me its just an interesting bit of entertainment playing at it.

~~waterdrop~~
Click to expand...
Just to clarify, I did order in the macro ferts (NPK) plus Excel, which I have been using for just under a week. I had the Flourish Comprehensive several weeks prior and was using as my sole fert (plus some root tabs) until I got my macros. I have been following Seachem's dosing schedule (per their website); they recommend the NPK, plus iron, Excel, Flourish and Flourish trace. I guess the question is "do I need Trace?". It appears that the supplements cross over between Flourish Comprehensive and Trace, just at different concentrations. Or do I get Trace and drop the Comprehensive?
 
Well gee, they just want to be sure you buy every bottle they make, eh? :lol: You're nearly set up to repeat my experiment there! I don't know, I'm certainly not an expert. I have just gone on an assumption, without even examining the labels or website, that the traces in the comprehensive Flourish were pretty similar to the traces in the Trace product. So my feeling was (and this is what I'm in fact doing at the moment.. even avoided buying a bottle of Trace when it was right in front of me yesterday in a shop!) that I could just use up my current bottle of comprehensive before switching over to trace. I've never bought the Iron, feeling that the amounts of iron available in either the comprehensive or the trace were sufficient for the typical dosings of iron that I see in the EI articles.

By the way, I -do- feel, even its a bit of overkill, that for beginners like you and me this is a worthwhile effort. I feel stongly now that my tank was too "sterile" for plants when I first started out and lost a lot of plants. I saw a very big difference once I started dosing fertilizers for them and paying more attention to the details of the plant symptoms I was seeing and the ferts I was dosing.

Way back in the threads somewhere I have full info from Dave Spencer and Aaron about a supplier in North America where you can get just the right dry ferts to mix up with water and make your own inexpensive and really good ferts. I expect it'll be a pain doing the searches to find this info again and I wish I'd recorded it but its my intent to move to this different and hopefully less expensive method at some point. I'm just lazy, thinking I'll need to get bottles and stuff and sort of set myself up. Then of course someday I hope to move to pressurized on at least one tank so I can actually join in the hobby more seriously, lol!

~~waterdrop~~
 
Day 85 (into week 12 already dag nabbit).

Readings after 24 hours are showing ammonia processing but nitrites are all over the map. I forgot to take readings last evening so I checked late and added ammonia late, but nitrites levels today are through the roof. Also have been adding a big 'ol heaping tablespoon of baking soda nightly only to maintain pH of 7.4. Way back in the day I could increase the pH by 4 points with a tbsp. Crazy. And I also noticed that snails don't like baking soda; they twist around in their shells!

The hygro has gotten quite rooty; they have sprouted all over the stem and are quite long. They are also growing up out of the sand. Should I trim them? It looks bizarre.
 
If your mineral content is so high that you can't affect it with that much bicarb, it is time to reset the tank by doing a big water change. We don't usually recommend water changes during a cycle but it sounds like your water is way out of control. The snails are probably bothered by the mineral content being pushed even higher.
 
I think I had a bunch of hygro in my tank early on because everyone included it in the "easy" lists but it died right away on me. But that was back before I had any nutrients in my tank.

OM, does it bother you that DT has a nice big filter, seems to be doing everything right but is not farther along with signs from the fishless cycle at day 85? (maybe that canadian lake water is too clean and clear, lol)

~~waterdrop~~
 
I did a fairly big water change on Saturday because I thought I might have had a bacteria bloom. I think it was just from the ferts.

As far as pH goes, I tested last night (an hour after) I added a tablespoon of baking soda. The reading was 8.2. Twenty four hours later it was 7.8. That seems like a pretty big drop in a short time span. Previously it was taking about 5-6 days before I saw that kind of pH drop.

The only thing I have done differently in the past week or two was add macro ferts. I HAVE done a couple water changes - along with some algae scrubbing. Maybe the green stuff has taken over the filter?? Can't see that happening...can I?
 
What are the actual chemicals in the macro ferts? For me the P is KH2PO4, the K is in the form of K2SO4 and the nitrogen, something you should not need right now, is KNO3. I use CSM+B for traces but I am sure other brands of traces would work fine. The ferts I use come as crystals and powders that I mix to make my liquids for dosing. I know you are using liquid dosing but the chemicals should be on the labels anyway. I would definitely avoid adding the nitrogen supplement along side a 5 ppm dose of NH4OH. Any more nitrogen than that would be gross overkill.
The rapid pH drop may just possibly show that you are converting some more ammonia through to nitrates that include a fraction of nitric acid. Another possibility is that the tap water chemistry is changing with the seasons. My summer water is higher in minerals than the spring or fall water. More or less rain at different times of year can definitely affect the mineral content of tap water depending on the source, unless you are working with water from a very deep well.
As to WD's question, yes it bothers me but you and I are not on the scene to witness the actual processes that are going on and the Q&A on a forum takes a long time from observation to response. This whole thread might be a 5 minute talk if we were face to face, except when I get long winded like this.
 
Interesting OM. I never figured the addition of Nitrogen into the system as a potential catalyst to the ammonia. If I am to believe that this is what you are saying then it makes sense.

Here is what is on the label of the Seachem bottles:

Flourish Potassium: Soluble Potash (K[sub]2[/sub]O) 5% (derived from potassium sulphate)
Flourish Phosphorus: P[sub]2[/sub]O[sub]5[/sub] 0.3% (also more soluble potash 0.2%)

Where do you get your dry ferts from?

I will definitely discontinue the use of the Nitrogen!
 
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