Starting A New/old Tank

[Bretzz]

I looked for donors but theres none near my area, I have friends with fish though, do I just scrape some gunk off their filter and put it on mine?

 

[Katty]

No, you will need to take either a whole or piece (cut it with scissors) of their filter sponge, or some other piece of loose filter media like little plastic balls, ceramic pieces, etc. Even an old bag of carbon from their filter could help a little. Then you place that in your filter, turn on the filter, and begin dosing ammonia. It'll shorten the cycle to about a week or two if you get enough used media.

In my experience, decorations and gravel from a cycled tank do not work. It needs to be an item located inside of the filter.

 

[Bretzz]

Ok thanks for all your help!

 

[Katty]

Yup, good luck!

 

[OldMan47]

Actually I have found that merely cleaning a mature filter in a new tank is good enough to get a very short clone going in my tanks. I take one of my nastiest filters and simply use my new tank as my cleaning bucket for that filter. When I am done with that I do a fishless cycle on the new tank and almost always find it ready for fish in about a week. The new tank seldom looks new after it has been used as my cleaning bucket but it almost always tests as ready for a fish stocking.