Help With Cycling

[Benunited]

Hi Waterdrop

Yep, have been adding ammonia every day.

Not sure why the PH dropped when I added bicard at 7.

Will do the water change asap though. Did a large one very recently but this has happened again.

Thanks

Ben

 

[drobbyb]

Towards the end of your cycle the nitrate produced has an effect on your water chemistry turning it acidic. To combat this you need to watch your pH closely and change the water when it gets below 6.5. You can also add bicarb, which I see you have been doing. It might just be a matter of adding a little more. Do you happen to know your tap water's KH by chance?

 

[waterdrop]

Agree with Robby. Toward the end, in tanks with less buffer and more pH drop, we preferentially like to see whether perhaps weekly large gravel-clean-water-change-ammonia-recharges will successfully sustain the pH back up in the high 7's but if the water change alone can't do this then bicarb (baking soda) is the next choice of action. Dosing at one tablespoon per 50L/13USG is a good bet. As Robby indicates, KH measurements are the way to have much more fine tuning over this issue.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Benunited]

Aaaaaagggggh!

This is now frustrating the hell out of me now!

Wednesday 7pm:
Ammonia: 0
Nitrite: 0.1
PH 7

Thursday 7am:
PH 6 - added bicarb

Thursday 7pm:
Ammonia: 0
Nitrite: 0
PH 7

Friday 7am:
PH 6 - added bicarb

Friday 7pm:
Ammonia: 0
Nitrite: 0
PH 7

Today 7am:
PH 6 - added bicarb

Today 7pm:
Ammonia: 0
Nitrite: 0.1 !!!!!!!!!!!!
PH: 7 !!!!!!!!!!!

Thought today was day 3 out of 8 and I'd be getting fish next week

Any more advice out there? Thanks so much for the advice so far!

Not checked the KH yet as things were going well - but have been adding the bicarb every day. Neighbour says we do indeed have very soft water round here, if that helps at all.

When the cycle has finally finished what am I going to do to keep the PH from crashing? Chemical balancer?

But for now I'm just needing to finish this cycle. Has been about 2 months now and it's driving me crazy!

 

[OldMan47]

If you are needing to dose bicarb daily, it is time to start thinking about a long term strategy for maintaining the KH of your tank water. Any water that moves around that easily needs to have some sort of buffer added to the water to help stabilize things. If you knew you wanted to keep hard water fish, the answer would be easy, you just add some crushed shell or crushed coral to the filter flow path and as it gradually dissolves in the extremely soft water, the water becomes a bit harder and the calcium carbonate also tends to raise the pH. It works fine if you are targeting a pH of over 7.5 but if you want to keep soft water low pH fish, I would go to a commercial pH buffer instead. Proper buffering of water to various different pH targets is a whole science project of its own and is beyond most of us to devise a good scheme. Buffering to the value slightly below a pH of 8.0 is a breeze because that is where the shell will tend to drive pH if you get too much into the filter.

 

[drobbyb]

Waterdrop and I are writing an article that deals with this very issue. It's not completely finished yet however.

As OldMan47 has stated, crushed coral would probably be your best bet. I am willing to bet that your tap water has a low KH. I have to deal with this problem where I live as our tap water is so soft. I made the decision to put crushed coral in my filters, and have been experiencing stable conditions.

Here's the short version of the technique that I use: You need to buy a small bag of "crushed coral" or aragonite substrate. You will also need the foot off of a pair of nylons or a tuxedo sock or other suitable mesh material. Take a handfull of the crushed coral and put it in the mesh bag and rinse it out in old tank water thouroghly. Take this bag and put it somewhere in your filter where there is alot of flow. Test your tap's pH, and test everyday until you get a rise of no more than .5 of a pH unit. After you have reached .5 over your tap's ph, do a large waterchange, at least 50%. Note how many days it too reach .5 over your tap's pH. Whith further testing you can work out how many days you can go between waterchanges, and only need to test periodicailly. You also need to "recharge" your bag of media. Every regular waterchange you need to squeeze the bag around so that media in the bag turns white again, making the calcium available to the water.

Now if you miss a waterchange and your pH goes up further than .5 you would do a few smaller waterchanges to get the level down slowly enough as to not shock the fish. It's better not to miss a waterchange unless you really need to miss it.

Hope that helps!!

 

[Benunited]

Thanks folks for the long term ph advice? Will certainly follow it.

Out of interest, what do you make of the chemical 'balancers'? I see there are some products which say they will keep ph at 7.

And any advice for the short-term? I just can't get perfect results more than 2 days in a row. Every time I get to day 3 and think I'm near the end of the cycle I get bad news.

 

[OldMan47]

In very soft water like yours, they do work but I find the cost a bit exorbitant to use them. If all you want is to raise the pH, the crushed shell/crushed coral will do a dandy job for years at a time for only a small investment in time setting it up and regular water changes that are needed anyway.

 

[Benunited]

Thanks for the advice

Would you say my tank is now cycled and ready for fish?

 

[OldMan47]

You are getting very close to being cycled but I would watch the chemistry for a few days before declaring victory.

 

[Benunited]

Ammonia levels now consistently dropping to zero in 12 hours
Nitrite levels now consistently dropping to zero in 24 hours

For the cycle to be finished, am I aiming for the above, or for both readings to be zero in 12 hours?

Also, was advised to keep my KH up I should dose with bicard between each water change? Does this make sense?

 

[OldMan47]

You really want to consistently get to double zeros at 12 hours to say you are done.

 

[waterdrop]

Agree, you want to consistently get to double zeros at 12 hours and maintain that for a week or so as a "proof" that its not going to mini-cycle on you again.

I think we gave you the bicarb recommendations earlier in the thread. You just want to add KH as an additional test when you are testing and then watch the trends of both KH and pH in your aquarium log entry lines. From that you should easily be able to see how the KH drop is a leading indicator of the pH drop over time. Generally people report that above KH=4 the pH stays pretty stable but as the KH begins to drop to 4, 3, 2 etc. then the probability that pH will, rather suddenly usually, begin to drop from whatever its normal higher level is will greatly increase. So from that you can learn to play with the point at which you re-dose bicarb to keep things smooth instead of having them drop. And of course all of this only applies to the "bacterial growing soup" and is not something you'll do once you have fish.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Benunited]

Hi folks

One more question for you if you don't mind!?

Just taking things back a few steps... I found whenever my ph fell down to around 6 then it stalled my fishless cycle and nitrites started to go up again.

From what I understand, my ph kept falling because I have softish water.

So, I've been using bicarb to keep the ph higher and stable and since then the readings have been great. This week I've had ammonia and nitrite both returning to 0 within 12 hours. Great!

So... now it's time for fish. Ideally I'd like to try neon cardinals and a single siamese fighter fish. While I've read that cardinals are perhaps not for beginners, I am more than prepared to put in the time and effort to care for them as best I can.

From my research I understand I should be aiming for a ph of around 6 for the cardinals.

My tap water ph is between 7 and 8.

So... should I

1. Forget cardinals
2. Add cardinals with ph around 7
3. Try and lower my ph?

But, if I lower my ph, will the problems I had during my cycle start again? By this I mean will it start to produce nitrites in the tank which won't be processed into nitrates within 24 hours, thereby harming the cardinals?

Thanks for any advice you can give. You've all been a huge help!

 

[drobbyb]

While cardinals and neons both prefer a low pH, they can be acclimated to your tap water and if you get them locally they may already be acclimated. A pH of 7 isn't bad at all. It's a great pH to have since you aren't to far from 6 or 8, and that allows you to keep almost any fish you want.

So in short, don't try changing the pH of your water (except in a fishless cycle and your pH crashes.) Most fish will adapt to neutral water without you having to do anything at all.