My living room is beginning to smell like a jungle !!! Not sure if that's a good sign or not.
Can I ask how much ammonia you added to your 64l to get the cycle started?
Your living room should never smell like anything but perhaps freshly turned garden soil. If it takes on much more of an odor than that,you have something not quite right going on in your filter.
At the beginning of my cycle the living room did smell. The smell was not apparent when I first added the ammonia (10ml) but was noticeable about a day later. But once the ammonia count dropped from 4.9 (nutranfin testing kit) to 2.4 the odor was not present. Is this normal? Or would you say that something is wrong with my filter also?
I'm kinda confused
I never said that the smell was caused by the filter. I merely suggested that Ph buffers and bacterial aids that had been used in the tank COULD have been responsible for the problems I was having with the water. The Bacterial bloom on it's own surely shouldn't have caused a 2cm layer of white gunk over the entire tank. This gunk was very foul smelling and caused my filter to block within 2 days of its appearance. I may be wrong but I have read that Ph buffers in particular can dump a lot of Phosphates in the water and i'm wondering if it was this as well as using the Filter Start product, that was responsible. Once the majority of it had been removed, the smell improved dramatically. The filter never caused the problem or made it worse, it simply could not cope that well with the huge amounts of gunk in the tank. The fact that there were Nitrites and Nitrates in the tank could also suggest some form of dumping by the products used. Since the use of these products as been stopped, the water balance has gone back to normal and is at levels expected for the beginning of a Fishless cycle. So please accept my apologies for any confusion caused but the problems I have had were not filter related in any way.
