Little Update And A Couple Of Questions

[andy_sheff]

well, today is day 7 of my fishless cycle, i havent been writing anything down or testing for anything but amonia, its slowly going down i think, i think its around 2ppm now, hoping it will get to 0 within a couple of days, is it worth testing for other things or shall i wait til its sorting the amonia out from 5 - 0 in 12 hours then start monitoring other things, i might check ph make sure thats not too low...

a couple of questions,..

the tank it looking pretty ####ty, green on the glass, i put some of the wood in thats light on one side and brown on the other and it got some serious amount of clear slime on the light side, ive cleaned it off, what is this stuff and is it bad??
the water is brown as some of the wood has stained it, can i change the water and clean the tank a bit or is this a total waste of time... if i make sure the filter is kept in a bucket of the water thats in there now?

anything else i should know?

cheers

 

[GoGators]

Im a newb myself but I believe the wood is mopani. If it's zoo med mopani I boiled mine for over 16 hours and it is still leaching tannins which is what is turning the water brown. I gave up and went and bought another piece of drift wood that wasn't mopani. The mopani is in a pot of water in my garage until it cures. The tannins will lower your PH or so I've read. It's been 3 weeks and the mopani is still turning the water in the pot brown while the piece in the tank hasn't done that but it's not Mopani.

 

[andy_sheff]

i see! it is mopani yes, i forgot the name but thats refreshed my memory. its in a container soaking now so i think thats where it will stay for a while, the gunk stuff was a bit grim !

 

[GoGators]

Change the water in the container everyday. Mine never made it to the tank because of the tea colored water.

 

[andy_sheff]

i will, i hope thats not the case with this piece!

 

[GoGators]

I wished I knew something else to tell ya but that's all I know. I live in Florida so I thought about sitting it in this 98 degree heat to cure but I don't know if it'll work or not. It's cool looking driftwood but a pain in the butt to cure as your finding out. The other wood I boiled for 2 hours and it didn't change the water color any but that mopani turns to tea in 10 minutes.

 

[waterdrop]

I've not done mopani myself but from what I've read you guys are on the right track. Leave it submerged in a bucket. When you happen to have some free time, boil up a kettle, drain the bucket, pour the boiling water over the wood and top up to resubmerge the wood. Plan to just leave it like this for months, changing water or hitting it with hot when you can and if it surprises you and stops making the water yellow then you're done.

Andy, you're doing the right thing to just patiently check ammonia for the first week or so. Pretty soon it should drop to zero and then pretty quickly it should start dropping the ammonia to zero within 24 hours after it was put in. When that happens it becomes interesting to start also testing nitrite(NO2) and pH.

For pH you should be aware of what your tap water pH is and then keep an eye on what happens to your tank pH. Initially the pH may go up a bit due to release of CO2 after it comes out of the public pipes and also due to the ammonia, which has a basic pH. But after a while the nitric acid, which comes along with the nitrates(NO3) which a tiny number of N-Bacs are producing will push the tank in the acid direction. Depending on what the original mineral content of the water was, the pH might either hold steady or might begin to drop. If the mineral content is very low the pH could drop rather quickly and when that happens, the bacterial growth could stall.

For nitrite(NO2), what normally happens is that the tests initially show a small amount because the A-Bacs are producing only a small amount and the few N-Bacs are converting some of it to nitrate(NO3), but then, gradually, the A-Bac population will grow more quickly and produce much more nitrite(NO2) than the slow N-Bac population can handle so the nitrite test will build to the very top of what can be measured and then stay there. Once its peaked like that its called the "nitrite spike" stage of the fishless cycling process.

There are more stages after that but this roadmap should do you for a while.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[indir-emir]

Dunno if this will acutally work but it did for me.

I spent like 2 weeks soaking my mopani wood (was a medium L shapped piece). Changing water every day , boiling water every other day. Was leaching like crazy even after all that.

Well we moved house recently and the wood was in the cupboard (out of water) for rougly 2 days. It dried up and had no water left in it (as far as i could tell anyway). Anyway, after id remebered i had to soak the wood i put it in the bath with hot water, and left it overnight. And badabing badaboom no leaching. Its now in the tank with some anubias and java fern tied to it at each corner (check over in the planted tank section if you wanna see how it looks) and has been for over 24 hour, tank is still crystal clear

Regards,
Indir

 

[andy_sheff]

ile be patient with the wood im in no rush to put it in. Ive checked today and amonia is between 0.25 and 0.5 i think, is it time to put some more in or wait til its fully down to 0?

 

[holidayinn]

I bought a fairly large piece of wood that had been in another tank for a couple of years. Still I soaked it for a couple of weeks, changing water, put in my tank and...still leaks tannins, even now, over 6 months since I bought it, it still leaks tannins.

On the other hand, I purchased another large piece of wood straight from LFS, soaked it in bucket, never leaked tannins so put it in the tank....no tannins!

I guess each piece of wood varies. I find that with water changes the tannins are slowly being faded out.

 

[waterdrop]

ile be patient with the wood im in no rush to put it in. Ive checked today and amonia is between 0.25 and 0.5 i think, is it time to put some more in or wait til its fully down to 0?

.25 or .5 is still plenty of ammonia for the tiny beginning population so you can just try to wait for zero.. on the other hand if it goes a couple more days like that I'd just add it back up to 4ppm or so anyway. --wd

 

[andy_sheff]

amonia was at 0 this morning sotopped it back up to 5ish!