TwoTankAmin
Fish Connoisseur
If you are following the directions for fishless cycling in this site, you are doiung ir exactly right. If you are improvising, than you may run into problems.
As was pointed oit earlt on in this thread one of the most important things one needs for a fishless cycle is patience. This is why it can take one person only four weeks to get a tank cycled while another need 8 weeks.
The single most important determination of how long any given cycle might take is almost impossible to know. How much bacteria is there at the start? Most of the bacteria to start will come out of your tap. Some may come in from the air. This should help folks to understand what wet is to the vacteria. There is enough humidity in the air to keep them alive and to float around. But that is not the primary way they get into our tanks.
The way you make any cycle go faster is to have more bacteria at the start. With a bottle of Dr. Tim's One and Only you can fully cycle a tank for a full fish load in 7-10 days. If you can seed bacteria from a going tank you can reduce the normal cycling time by 1/2 or more as long as the amount of seed bacteria is enough. They key is you are adding both the ammonia and the nitrite bacteria. This means they are in balance so for any amount of ammonia they can turn into nitrite, there are sufficient nitrite oxidizers present to handle right away.
Under optimal conditions the ammonia oxidizers can double in about 9 hours but the nitrie oxidizers take more like 12 hours. if conditions are not optimal the times increase. The bacteria reprodice when there is more ammonia or nitrite than the existing colony needs. They stop reproducing under the reverse conditions. If they lose their source of ammonia or oxygen, they do not die, they go into a state of dormancy.
They will revive when these things return. It will take between 6 months and a year for the colony to shrink to the point where it cannot fairly quickly resume the full capacity the colony had before going dormant. Howere, some individual will survive this way for a very long time. Unfortunatey, not enough will be present to matter in terms of resuming the same capacity they had when they went dormant.
As was pointed oit earlt on in this thread one of the most important things one needs for a fishless cycle is patience. This is why it can take one person only four weeks to get a tank cycled while another need 8 weeks.
The single most important determination of how long any given cycle might take is almost impossible to know. How much bacteria is there at the start? Most of the bacteria to start will come out of your tap. Some may come in from the air. This should help folks to understand what wet is to the vacteria. There is enough humidity in the air to keep them alive and to float around. But that is not the primary way they get into our tanks.
The way you make any cycle go faster is to have more bacteria at the start. With a bottle of Dr. Tim's One and Only you can fully cycle a tank for a full fish load in 7-10 days. If you can seed bacteria from a going tank you can reduce the normal cycling time by 1/2 or more as long as the amount of seed bacteria is enough. They key is you are adding both the ammonia and the nitrite bacteria. This means they are in balance so for any amount of ammonia they can turn into nitrite, there are sufficient nitrite oxidizers present to handle right away.
Under optimal conditions the ammonia oxidizers can double in about 9 hours but the nitrie oxidizers take more like 12 hours. if conditions are not optimal the times increase. The bacteria reprodice when there is more ammonia or nitrite than the existing colony needs. They stop reproducing under the reverse conditions. If they lose their source of ammonia or oxygen, they do not die, they go into a state of dormancy.
They will revive when these things return. It will take between 6 months and a year for the colony to shrink to the point where it cannot fairly quickly resume the full capacity the colony had before going dormant. Howere, some individual will survive this way for a very long time. Unfortunatey, not enough will be present to matter in terms of resuming the same capacity they had when they went dormant.
