New To Hobby And Outlook Is Not Great... Help

[Jozlyn]

use water conditioner - it will make cycling harder but keep your fish alive...

It will also stop chlorine and chloramine from killing your fish! Make sure you use it!

I am cycling with fish... i have had fish in since sunday. I am using quick dip ammonia test strips.
They're useless get a proper liquid based test kit.

The danios are doing great and dont seem to show any effects from the ammonia levels so i am assuming that the bacteria will take a while to catch up.
The danios are ok at the moment, yes it will take the bacteria quite a while to catch up, do lots of big water changes, daily until your tank cycles.

but is there anything i can add to speed up the cycling process wihtout hurting the fish.
Not really most of the cycling suplements don't really work very well if at all.

So i guess my question is... are ammonia readings common while cycling with fish.
Yes, because you don't have any/enough good bacteria in your filter yet, so the amonia is slowly poisioning them

 

[rdd1952]

use water conditioner - it will make cycling harder but keep your fish alive...

Dechlorinators won't have any adverse effect on the cycling process. Some water conditoners that say they "remove ammonia and nitrite" definitely will impeed the cycling process as the tank will take a very long time to cycle (or maybe never will cycle) if the ammonia and nitrite are removed via chemicals.