How Annoying Is Nitrite?

[waterdrop]

What, you don't long to settle in with the latest copy of "Journal of Bacteriology" on a saturday night?

 

[Miss Wiggle]

What, you don't long to settle in with the latest copy of "Journal of Bacteriology" on a saturday night?

you know how to live it up WD

 

[Twinklecaz]

Ha ha!

 

[OldMan47]

I'm afraid that I must agree with WD on this one. If you start out with a low ammonia concentration and simply start to increase it after the nitrite spike, where does that leave you? You will certainly not be ramping to 5 ppm of ammonia in a day or two. Instead you may find yourself cycled to let's say 1 ppm of ammonia. Since your nitrites have caught up, you could say that the N-bacs are ready to face 2.7 ppm of nitrites per day. OK so your tank settles down at 1 ppm of ammonia daily with no detectable nitrites after 12 hours. Is that cycled, not by any traditional definition. What do you do to get there? You raise the ammonia addition to 5 ppm. On day 1 the a*Bacs double their number and can process 2 ppm of ammonia daily. The next day they can process 4 ppm daily. Shortly after day 2, the A-bacs are at maximum efficiency. Where are your N-bacs? At day 1, they double their numbers and can keep up with the A-Bac input. The next day they also increase their numbers just as fast as the A-bacs and by day 3 there is no doubt that both bacteria can easily handle anything a reasonable tank stock can throw at them.
What does all of this mean? To me it means that any time I want a fully cycled biological filter, I can simply do whatever is practical for my old tank and I can expect my new tank to be ready in just a few days. For a new person starting out, it means that the concentration of ammonia used up front is almost meaningless. If you raise the concentration of daily ammonia additions at the last bit, it is enough to get a fully cycled filter in just a couple of days.