From what I have read on here, you can find ammonia in a store called Bootes. I probably spelled it wrong. The best fish to add to a new and uncycled tank is a dead fish in a piece of nylon stocking and just let it rot in the tank. I am told that prawns work well for that. It will smell terrible but will decay and produce ammonia. My own approach is to use the clear ammonia because I can control the dosage. The ammonia is found with cleaning products and is often used as a glass cleaner because it cuts through grease so well. If you buy ammonia, you need to make sure it is not "cloudy" ammonia which contains soaps. You also want to avoid anything with perfumes to make the smell of the ammonia not quite as strong.
What you are trying to do is simple once you understand it. Bacteria grow in the aquarium on surfaces in places with good water flow and lots of oxygen. The typical spot that happens in an aquarium is in the filter.
What we are trying to do is get rid of the ammonia that the fish and decaying organic matter produce. There are bacteria that use ammonia to live and give off nitrites so we encourage them to grow by providing the "food" in the form of ammonia. Nitrites are also poisonous to the fish but there we get lucky. There are other bacteria that use nitrites as food and produce nitrates when they use it. We try to encourage those to grow also by leaving traces of nitrites in the water for them to feed off of. At the beginning you have almost no beneficial bacteria in the tank so we add an ammonia source to get things started. As time goes by, the ammonia gets used up so we add a bit more to keep the developing bacteria fed. When we get to the point where we can raise the ammonia level to 5 ppm in the water and 12 hours later we come back and find it at zero, the ammonia eaters are well enough established. If the nitrites stay at zero after those same 12 hours, we have enough of those bacteria too. So far it is simple right, add some ammonia and wait for the bacteria to grow and make the tank safe for fish. Add a little more when the levels drop just to keep the process working and the bacteria alive. All the numbers you see in fishless cycle threads are people wondering if their bacteria are growing well enough to get the fish soon. A small problem will arise if you get too high an ammonia concentration or the pH gets too low. If the ammonia level is too high, you will end up with the wrong bacteria developing. If your pH drops below about 6.5, the process can stall because the bacteria we want don't grow very well in low pH water.
