Fishless cycle problem

[Sky042]

I started my fishless cycle friday night.
I bought the levels to roughly 6-8ppm my eyes have a hard time matching the green colors so I made a best guess.

I seeded the water with drippings from 2 established filters and then yesterday I also threw in a filter cartridge from an estabilshed tank.

Friday night it too 2.5TBsp to get the ammonia level that high. Sat I put in 1 Tbsp and sunday I didn't put in any because the level looked the same. Tonight I checked and the level is still the same. Why am I not seeing any dropoff in ammonia. How many days should it take to see a dropoff in ammonia?

I read some peoples logs from fishless cycle and they were seeing ammonia reduction in 1-2 days I have yet to see any. The water was treated there is def not any cholorine in the water. temp is about 88F lights have been off. This stuff should be growing like rapidfire

(tank info)
46USG bow front
Fluval 304 filter
bottom layer pre-filter
mid carbon/prefilter
top ploy-floss

2 powerheads with UGF.

 

[heresmike]

Hi Sky,

1st of all, I usually shoot for 4 or 5 ppm ammonia when doing a fishless cycle. And it looks to me like you ARE seeing somewhat of a drop in ammonia if you added some on Saturday and the level was the same when you tested on Sunday as it was on Friday. That means to me that it dropped enough to make up for what you added on Saturday. If it hadn't dropped, it would be higher than Friday's 6-8. Are you testing for nitrite?

 

[Sky042]

Hi Sky,

1st of all, I usually shoot for 4 or 5 ppm ammonia when doing a fishless cycle. And it looks to me like you ARE seeing somewhat of a drop in ammonia if you added some on Saturday and the level was the same when you tested on Sunday as it was on Friday. That means to me that it dropped enough to make up for what you added on Saturday. If it hadn't dropped, it would be higher than Friday's 6-8. Are you testing for nitrite?

well heres the thing. with my ammonia test set I can't make out the shades once it above 4 so from 4-8 I can't really distinguish the colors so when I added on saturday I could have pushed it from 6-8 and not known it. I am testing for nitrites todays reading of nitrites was 3ppm.

 

[modernhamlet]

Cycling is a very inexact science, so there's no way to know how long your particular tank should take for the ammonia to start dropping. When I fishless cycled my 29g, ammonia took a little more than a week to start dropping. From all the cycling stories I've heard here and elsewhere 1-2 weeks is normal. 1-2 days would probably be highly rare (and awesome ), unless you managed to seed the tank with a lot of bacteria.

<insert witty Chinese proverb about patience here>

Edit: The fact that you have nitrites is a great sign. Sounds like the tank is cycling normally. Once the nitrites jump (usually off the scale of the test kits), reduce your ammonia additions by half. That's when the real patience comes in. Nitrites generally take 2-3 times longer than ammonia to come down.

 

[heresmike]

What modernhamlet said! 3ppm nitrite is great for the short amount of time the cycle has been going. It's a sure sign that the cycle is on its way.