Bevs34, I am sorry to say this but you are the victim of a typical Local Fish Shop, LFS. What you have done is not a fishless cycle but a mockery of the entire hobby. Many, I am sure it is not all, LFS will tell you to set up a tank and wait anywhere from a few days to maybe a week. Then they will advise you to start adding fish if your water is good. The missing fact that is never mentioned is that your water will always be fine until you have something in your tank to act like fish. It may be a real fish or, if you follow our approach, it may be nothing more than commercially available ammonia. No matter which way it goes, all organic material that decays in a tank produces some ammonia and fish also provide some directly to the water from their gills. Until your filter is capable of removing that ammonia completely with no help from you, the tank's filter is not at a stage that we call cycled. If I have no fish and no other source of ammonia, the water will look much the same as water from a fully cycled filter. The problem lies in adding fish. When I do that, real world ammonia is produced and an uncycled filter will not be ready to handle it. A properly cycled filter will just shrug it off. There is a big difference.
I have links in my signature area to both fish-in cycling and fishless cycling. If you do not yet have any fish, please consider fishless cycling. It will save you tons of work compared to fish-in methods and will cause less harm to the fish too.
I have links in my signature area to both fish-in cycling and fishless cycling. If you do not yet have any fish, please consider fishless cycling. It will save you tons of work compared to fish-in methods and will cause less harm to the fish too.
