Menacer's Fishless Cycle Log
- Thread starter menacer
- Start date
You're waiting for Nitrite to shoot up, then waiting for that to decrease back to 0ppm.
Keep topping up your Ammonia to 4ppm every time it drops down to 0ppm - which should get to the daily stage - as you need to keep feeding the a-bacs.
Once your n-bacs are going well and reducing Nitrite back to 0ppm daily as well, you are ready for your water change.
Nitrates will be off the chart, but thats reduced with a water change.
Once you have done your 90% water change, ammonia and nitrite should be at 0ppm, and Nitrates will be low as well (due to the water change).
You can then stock your tank - you wont need to stock a few at a time, you can fully stock the tank as all of your bacteria are there are running!
Bad news is I hear Nitrite takes twice as long as Ammonia to get back to 0pm???!!!
Do you have a real plant or plastic?
The snail may have come fro a real plant??
Keep topping up your Ammonia to 4ppm every time it drops down to 0ppm - which should get to the daily stage - as you need to keep feeding the a-bacs.
Once your n-bacs are going well and reducing Nitrite back to 0ppm daily as well, you are ready for your water change.
Nitrates will be off the chart, but thats reduced with a water change.
Once you have done your 90% water change, ammonia and nitrite should be at 0ppm, and Nitrates will be low as well (due to the water change).
You can then stock your tank - you wont need to stock a few at a time, you can fully stock the tank as all of your bacteria are there are running!
Bad news is I hear Nitrite takes twice as long as Ammonia to get back to 0pm???!!!
Do you have a real plant or plastic?
The snail may have come fro a real plant??
I did put two live plants in but then took them out with the start of my new cycle. Thanks for the info, i thought the end was near but obviously not. It's a long old game this. Nitrite has gone through the roof so just waiting on the drop!
menacer: if you don't see a shift in nitrite soon, it can sometimes help to do a large water change to get it moving.. I reckon that it may have something to do with the amount of minerals in the water.
Looks like your A-Bacs are eating the ammonia up nicely 
I would leave the tank for the meantime. Its noted that Nitrites take a longer to go back to 0ppm because you are still adding ammonia daily to feed the a-bacs at the same time......
I would leave the tank for the meantime. Its noted that Nitrites take a longer to go back to 0ppm because you are still adding ammonia daily to feed the a-bacs at the same time......
waterdrop
Enthusiastic "Re-Beginner"
Yes, that's correct. The practice that oldman47 and I fell in to was to ease back a bit on the ammonia dose level during the second of the three phases of fishless cycling. Menacer has entered that second phase now, known as the "nitrite spike" phase, and it will last until suddenly nitrite one day drops to zero ppm within 24 hours of dosing ammonia.
What we theorized was that once the A-Bacs had been encouraged and were reliably dropping 4-5ppm of ammonia to zero ppm each day, we could ease back to 2-3ppm dosing and still maintain them ok. Meanwhile we would get an advantage by lowering the dose from 4-5ppm to 2-3ppm during the excess nitrite phase because both high nitrite and high nitrate are inhibitors of N-Bac growth. We get fastest N-Bac growth when those levels are nice and low. However, working against this we always have to respect the problem that disturbances (water changes) will always take away a little productive time from the overall process. So too many water changes is also working against you in a sense.
Anyway, time has gone by since we first theorized and introduced this tweak and lots of fishless cycles have been performed and completed using this added tweak and have been successful. Probably the jury is still out on whether we're getting any very significant shortening of the overall process time, but it's still something we hope people will keep incorporating into their process so we can continue to get a feel for overall results. In general, high nitrite, high nitrate and rapid drops in pH are things we don't like as the fishless cycle proceeds, but we tolerate them to a certain extent in order not to perform too many disruptive water changes. Does that make sense?
Another thing I'd like to say is that what fishless cycling is all about is getting that first necessary burst of the two populations, the Nitrosomonas and the Nitrospira, so that we can introduce the first stocking to a safe environment and not have to manually clean the water ourselves with daily water changes. But even after we do the first stocking (which can be large, even a full stocking in rare cases) there is still plenty of further maturation going on with both bacteria species for especially the first six months and throughout the first year. Additionally, the heterotrophs will also differentiate and create a more complex environment as will other microorganisms and the organic environment in general will become more complex. A six-month old tank is a much, much more beautiful environment for fish than a new tank right after the fishless cycle. If you are sensitive to your tank you will sometimes feel this in various ways. The water may seem more clear to you. The plants should certainly seem more established if you have live plants. The fish should have lively behavior from the beginning but at the six month old tank it should be just as lively yet more established due to the fish having worked out how they will interact with each other and their new tank.
I -love- freshwater tanks. There's just nothing quite like looking at one when you get home from work.
~~waterdrop~~
What we theorized was that once the A-Bacs had been encouraged and were reliably dropping 4-5ppm of ammonia to zero ppm each day, we could ease back to 2-3ppm dosing and still maintain them ok. Meanwhile we would get an advantage by lowering the dose from 4-5ppm to 2-3ppm during the excess nitrite phase because both high nitrite and high nitrate are inhibitors of N-Bac growth. We get fastest N-Bac growth when those levels are nice and low. However, working against this we always have to respect the problem that disturbances (water changes) will always take away a little productive time from the overall process. So too many water changes is also working against you in a sense.
Anyway, time has gone by since we first theorized and introduced this tweak and lots of fishless cycles have been performed and completed using this added tweak and have been successful. Probably the jury is still out on whether we're getting any very significant shortening of the overall process time, but it's still something we hope people will keep incorporating into their process so we can continue to get a feel for overall results. In general, high nitrite, high nitrate and rapid drops in pH are things we don't like as the fishless cycle proceeds, but we tolerate them to a certain extent in order not to perform too many disruptive water changes. Does that make sense?
Another thing I'd like to say is that what fishless cycling is all about is getting that first necessary burst of the two populations, the Nitrosomonas and the Nitrospira, so that we can introduce the first stocking to a safe environment and not have to manually clean the water ourselves with daily water changes. But even after we do the first stocking (which can be large, even a full stocking in rare cases) there is still plenty of further maturation going on with both bacteria species for especially the first six months and throughout the first year. Additionally, the heterotrophs will also differentiate and create a more complex environment as will other microorganisms and the organic environment in general will become more complex. A six-month old tank is a much, much more beautiful environment for fish than a new tank right after the fishless cycle. If you are sensitive to your tank you will sometimes feel this in various ways. The water may seem more clear to you. The plants should certainly seem more established if you have live plants. The fish should have lively behavior from the beginning but at the six month old tank it should be just as lively yet more established due to the fish having worked out how they will interact with each other and their new tank.
I -love- freshwater tanks. There's just nothing quite like looking at one when you get home from work.
~~waterdrop~~
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