southcity
New Member
I am getting excited, today my nitrites are dropping after my last dose of ammonia 12hrs ago. Nitrites down to .25ppm yay me!!!! getting there, maybe only a couple of weeks to go now!
The October FOTM Contest Poll is open!
🏆 Click to vote! 🏆
Yes, working towards that finally. Not at 0 yet but darn close to it.Yes, I assume you're aware that what you want is double zeros for ammonia and nitrite both at 12 hours after dosing in order to start your qualifying week, right? WD
Funny you should mention the Nirtite sticking. Mine was off the charts for days then suddenly in 12hrs dropped to about .25ppm, two days later it is remaining at about .05ppm. Not a worry for me, I will just have no choice but to wait it out and let it get to 0 before I consider myself in my last week. I did read on the another thread about cycling that the Nitrite can take twice as long as the ammonia to drop, so if that is the case I just might be in for another month or so, hope not but time will tell.OK, good, you've got the right idea. Sometimes late in the game you'll get what we call the "sticking problem" where (nitrite usually, but sometimes ammonia, surprisingly) one of them will drop each day but kind of "stick" at about 0.25ppm without going to zero ppm. (All this assuming you have zero in your tap, which is always my assumption in discussions unless explicitly talked about.) Anyway, the sticking problem will nearly always eventually go away, given enough time, but it's been known to drive many fishless cyclers crazy at the end, even to the point that they are willing to risk a fish-in cycle (which usually doesn't happen to them anyway if they've been cycling at least more than a month overall.)
~~waterdrop~~
Yeah, that twice as long thing is just another of our "guesstimates" just to be telling people stuff. The basic truth still holds that each stage varies all over the place in different individual instances. It's just that the second (nitrite) stage is almost always longer than the first stage except in cases of some sort of media seeding.
~~waterdrop~~