Starting Fishless Cycle..a Few Questions..

[Matt_]

How much Ammonia (household 9.5%) should I add to my 20gallon tank? And how often? And how often should I test? How will i know when the cycle is complete?

 

[ox5477]

How much Ammonia (household 9.5%) should I add to my 20gallon tank? And how often? And how often should I test? How will i know when the cycle is complete?

There is a table built up somewhere on TFF, but I don't know exactly where so I'm gonna tell you how I did it the first time I cycled my first tank.

Take a 1 gallon bucket (or bigger.. doesn't really matter). Add measured amounts of ammonia to the bucket until you get 4-6ppm. The, just scale up to whatever sized tank you have. This is perfect if you are doing multiple tanks at once, or even for the future as if you know the proportion to one gallon, you can always scale up from that. You might want to do it it in a 5 or 6 gallon bucket if your having trouble measuring out the small amount you'll need for 4 ppm in a 1 gallon bucket.

 

[Matt_]

Cheers. How often do I do this? When will I know when the cycle is complete?

 

[ox5477]

the first part of the cycle is complete once you see the ammonia drop from 4 ppm to 0 in 24 hrs or less. Then you want to see nitrites drop to 0. You want to keep adding ammonia to the water while you have the nitrite cycle going on as well... when your adding ammonia and the next day you have 0 ammonia ad 0 nitrite, then your cycle is done

Do a big water change (say 75 to 90%) to remove the large concentration of nitrate that has built up from the cycle and then bring the tank to temp and add your fish

 

[Matt_]

So keep adding ammonia everytime it drops to zero?

 

[ox5477]

yep... the ammonia is the food for the bacteria....if you stop supplying it, the bacteria will have nothing to eat and there will not grow and reproduce. Even when trying to grow the nitrite eating bacteria, you need to keep feeding the ammonia bacteria so they will produce the nitrite for the nitrite eating bacteria

 

[doresy]

Cheers. How often do I do this? When will I know when the cycle is complete?

Hi Mat.....not having a go but if you look at the 'pinned topic' at the head of this forum you will see one about fishless cycle.

If you cannot see it then CLIK HERE

Members take a lot of time and trouble writing these so please have a look before posting such a wide opened question

 

[backtotropical]

Hi,

Here is the ammonia calculator for you.

You should also read this article on fishless cycling. It will give you a better understanding of what you are doing and will answer your questions.

HTH

BTT

 

[OldMan47]

Lets go through it. PPM is parts per million. 10% is close enough to your value. Lets look at a gallon of water, thats 128 ounces if its an american gallon, so 1 ounce puts you at (1/(128x20gal))x0.1 or about 391 ppm but that's too much so try 1 tsp which is 1/6 of an ounce and that gives me about 65 ppm. Since I only want 1/10 of that, I start with 1/2 a ml which is 1/10 of the 5 ml equivalent of a teaspoon or about 1/2 ml. To be on the safe side, try half that much and make sure your math has not thrown you off somewhere. When you test, if you get 3 ppm you know your math was right and add the other half of what you wanted. Otherwise, you are close and can adjust.

 

[Matt_]

Thanks for all your help. The ammonia levels in my tank are still about 2-3ppm..even after a week. Is something wrong?

 

[waterdrop]

Mine took more than 19 days before the first ammonia drop to zero, don't worry, you'll probably get there soon than that!

~~waterdrop~~