Yes, the others have answered the questions correctly. If you start 12-hour tests and find that ammonia has processed down to zero by 12 hours, you still don't add ammonia then, you wait and add at your 24-hour test (you don't have to test for ammonia at 24 hours obviously as its already gone to zero.) This is called "pulsing" I believe, by the waste water industry, where the bacteria are shown a zero period (I think of it as letting them get their appetite up
) Of course, zero is relative, because our test kits can not resolve small amounts of ammonia and actually, those unresolvable amounts are enough to be keeping the colony going! (Hint: think about what's going on once the filter is running "perfectly!")
In answer to your question about "cheating" a little and not ending the fishless cycle by reaching the ability to process a full 5ppm, I have a complicated answer. I feel its important to remember that we are not trying, really, to "match" the colony size to the initial bioload, we are trying to create a pair of colonies that are significantly larger and more robust than the initial bioload so that there will be no chance of them falling in to what we call a "mini-cycle" where we suddenly discover that one of the colonies (nearly always the N-Bac colony, the Nitrospira set of species) isn't really performing fully yet. Based on the feedback we get from our tests, we can see that the colonies don't always appear to perform in a linear fashion, sometimes, seemingingly to us a bit randomly, while they are still immature, they just suddenly don't process as much in a day and we see it as a sudden spike where before we were seeing consistent progress each day in how much/fast they could process. This is just part of the process of training the colony to be "robust".. to be up to size.
So I feel the proper answer to the "cheating" question is that we'd really like to always qualify a filter for 5ppm, even if we were going to only put one fish in there. But in real life, if you follow our cases here, you will find that sometimes we do "give in" in stubborn cases where the person is definately going to only 50% (say) stock and the final stage of the cycle is dragging way out. In many of those cases we've found that even though we switch over to having fish and treating it like a fish-in cycle, we often find the filter was up to it and we don't see further spikes crop up. It just depends on the case.
I don't think my Prime as ever appeared to have blue things in it when I pour some in the cap. It just appears clear. I believe Seachem has good tech support and you could try emailing them down in Atlanta (I think that's where Greg and company still have headquarters!)
The nitrite spike phase is -usually- but not always longer than the pre-nitrite spike phase. They are all somewhat unpredictable. It looks to me like you are now experiencing the fun and learning pay-off. Having waited a long time with your ammonia sticking at 2ppm you had a greater appreciation when it dropped quickly to zero after that. This is what I mean when I say that this long messy fishless cycling is a good experience for a beginner to use to get very hands-on with the nitrogen cycle and their filter. I feel that being forced to kind of "get focused" on it makes for a much better "memory" of the stuff in all your later years of the hobby. No other filter cycling will ever be as hard as that first one (of course, if you are constantly running tanks, they will all be "clones" in the future, not raw fishless cycles.)
~~waterdrop~~
? Will the Nitrite be being produced as soon as I put the Ammonia in by that stage then?
