Should I Give Up?

[355858]

Im having what could possibly be the worst luck ever! Some of you may be aware of my complete failure of a fishless cycle that didnt change for 30 days, so i dumped it cleaned it and started again, neway all clean all going well so i thought add some trumpet snails and feed them with algae wafers, added trumpet snails (12 of them) and 10 hrs later 10 dead.. What am i doing wrong ive never experienced problems with keeping fish like this before!

 

[NinjaSmurf]

Don't give up. Have you tried getting some mature media from someone and cloning a tank?

 

[355858]

Its really unfortunate that i live in a rural area my nearest lfs shop is 20 miles away and theyre not prepared to give there old filter media to me, i dont kno why. And i dont kno of anyone locally who keeps fish..

 

[NinjaSmurf]

Well, you could try to cycle again, how did you go about it the first time versus this last time?

 

[monikerCTBP]

I actually don't know of your problem so I have to ask a couple questions.

1. How big is the tank

and

2. what ppm did you keep your ammonia level during your fishless cycle?

 

[355858]

60 litre juwel rekord tank added 4 ppm ammonia and no change, checked ammonia and its deffinately the right stuff dunno what to do

 

[monikerCTBP]

60 litre juwel rekord tank added 4 ppm ammonia and no change, checked ammonia and its deffinately the right stuff dunno what to do

When I was researching fishless cycling they said that it should maintain a minimum of 5ppm of ammonia. I'm assuming that 4ppm would be fine it would just take longer. The thing about Fishless Cycling is that it WILL happen at some point, you just have to be patient.

Other things to consider is that as you add the ammonia, add some Stress Zyme or other "jump starting" bacteria products that your pet store will carry. This gets the live bacteria into the filter and your tank and helps the process start up. I had to use it on my 10 gallon and it worked great.

 

[jacko32]

what filter do you have and what media is in it ?
where do you live?
whats the pH of your water?

 

[355858]

Ive got stress zyme and added stress coat i live in norfolk england, my ph is around 8.2 and i use the juwel 4 stage filter which is 2 foam green and blue with carbon filter and a white fluffy filter

 

[monikerCTBP]

The only thing I can really think of is that you just have to be patient with it. It's a force of nature really, it will happen at some point. The presence of ammonia will cause the bacteria to grow. You just have to make sure the levels stay up. Make sure you don't change out any water until you get the Nitrites. Just wait it out. Add Stress Zyme as the bottle instructs. Other than that I dunno.

The only other options I have heard of were to buy Zebra Dainos or a very hardy fish and let them do the poop thing. Some people aren't about doing that though.

Oh and when you cleaned your tank out I hope you didn't use any cleaners or soaps.

 

[jacko32]

i would try again at fishless cycling do you have any live plants as they are great at helping reduce biomass

 

[355858]

Yea i has two small anubias and an amazon swordplant nah i just used water to clean it all ..

 

[jacko32]

to be honest i didnt fishless cycle the recommended way i started with 3ppm and over a period of about 2 weeks i built it up to 5ppm most people say dose to 5ppm and cut back to half when the ammonia drops
i dosed to 3ppm everyday untill it dropped to 0ppm in 12hours or less then i started dosing 5ppm everyday untill that was dropping to 0ppm in 12hours after 3 days of cycling i had both high nitrites and high nitrates then i did some serious planting and the plants just sucked up all the nitrates and the ammonia and nitrites started dropping in just under 6 hours
but it was defo the plants that speeded it up so much

 

[Marco84]

Get a couple of white cloud minnows, they are super hardy and do a fish in cycle. I cycled my betta tank this way and they both survived.

 

[waterdrop]

60 litre juwel rekord tank added 4 ppm ammonia and no change, checked ammonia and its deffinately the right stuff dunno what to do

When I was researching fishless cycling they said that it should maintain a minimum of 5ppm of ammonia. I'm assuming that 4ppm would be fine it would just take longer. The thing about Fishless Cycling is that it WILL happen at some point, you just have to be patient.

Other things to consider is that as you add the ammonia, add some Stress Zyme or other "jump starting" bacteria products that your pet store will carry. This gets the live bacteria into the filter and your tank and helps the process start up. I had to use it on my 10 gallon and it worked great.

This is an incorrect assumption combined with some mis-information from whatever your source was. 5ppm ammonia concentrations during fishless cycling are not "minimum levels." If you think about it, a very mature, perfectly cycled (regardless of cycling method) filter will maintain a robust, mature pair of bacterial colonies for years even though the fishkeeper will always happily see "zero ppm" if he performs an ammonia test on this "perfect" tank with a good liquid test! This is because even the "trace" of ammonia that can't be detected by our kits but that is moving from the fish (and debris that is breaking down) to the bacteria, where it is processed, is "enough" to maintain the colonies. Of course, this is maintaining, not increasing the growth.

Instead, 5ppm is just a way to -test- the colony size and it is most important right at the end, during the last couple of weeks of fishless cycling, to prove that the colony sizes have indeed increased to the point where a full bioload for the given tank size could be handled by the filter without mini-cycles occurring.

It -does- seem to be the case though that fishless cycling at only a 1 or 2ppm level may slow things down. It may be that this increases the periods when most of the ammonia has been used and so the new colonies see less of an excess to respond to with increased growth. So 3ppm to 5ppm is the range we keep targeting in on as optimal and the 3ppm side is more optimal during the nitrite spike stage, whereas the 5ppm is needed by the end, as said. Lowering to 3ppm during the middle period helps to slow the amount of excess nitrite and nitrate increasing in the tank during the spike. These substances are known to have a slowing effect on the bacterial growth when they get high. At the other extreme of things, 7-8ppm is too high a concentration level because it enourages a known different species of bacteria that we don't want.

I would prefer it if we could find something to change in the fishless cycling process rather than switching to useing live fish for our tests. One thing I've wondered about are those green sponges that Fluval claim will remove nitrates - I think most of us decided those were probably harmless in the past but maybe we should re-examine them. Another possibility is to question the conditioner perhaps as one of the less talked about things is that some of them do sometimes seem to cause problems. ...but I'm just one voice (one drop in the water...)

~~waterdrop~~