Water Change During Cycle

[Aqua Tom]

When i did a giant water change in my fishless cycle i would say it set the cycle back 4days to a week. I wouldn't do a water change unless it's really neccesary but others have had better experiences with doing water changes mid cycle.

lol, everyone is telling me different. I will just leave it then

 

[Uriel]

I'm just giving personal experience. If you cycle stalls due to massive amounts of nitrates or your PH completely bottoming out then you really are left with no option but to do a water change. But if you can avoid them i probably would. During stage 2 with the nitrite spike i dropped my ammonia dose to 2ppm rather than 4 and only upped it to 4ppm once the nitrites had cleared. Genuinely happened over night. 1 day off the scale next day 0 nitrite. I then upped my dosing to 4-5ppm. I got into my qualifying week but then either ph or Nitrate messed up my nitrite cycle and started getting readings again. So did a full water change at this point.

I also add minute quantities of fish food. I mean like a piece of sugar sized. As i heard it contains some trace elements phosphate and potassium i believe off the top of my head that help the bacteria grow. May be rubbish or psuedo science but i figured what have i got to lose.

The other reason i think people reccomend water changes during fishless cycle is to top up trace elements in the water. But i will leave someone more educated than i to explain this one.

 

[Aqua Tom]

I'm just giving personal experience. If you cycle stalls due to massive amounts of nitrates or your PH completely bottoming out then you really are left with no option but to do a water change. But if you can avoid them i probably would. During stage 2 with the nitrite spike i dropped my ammonia dose to 2ppm rather than 4 and only upped it to 4ppm once the nitrites had cleared. Genuinely happened over night. 1 day off the scale next day 0 nitrite. I then upped my dosing to 4-5ppm. I got into my qualifying week but then either ph or Nitrate messed up my nitrite cycle and started getting readings again. So did a full water change at this point.

I also add minute quantities of fish food. I mean like a piece of sugar sized. As i heard it contains some trace elements phosphate and potassium i believe off the top of my head that help the bacteria grow. May be rubbish or psuedo science but i figured what have i got to lose.

The other reason i think people reccomend water changes during fishless cycle is to top up trace elements in the water. But i will leave someone more educated than i to explain this one.

I am adding 4ppm ammonia every day & getting trace amounts of nitites so I figure i am nearly there. Waterdrop has already told me about water changing to top up the trace elements but I think I am so close that I want to leave it incase I mess up my cycle. I think I may use your fishfood suggestion, it sounds convincing. How much do you think I need to add to a 180litre tank?

 

[Skins]

I think i can safely say that from this topic and many other fishless cycle threads(including mine) everybodys experience will differ and i can only base this on water chemistry. As you all know these A&N bacs can be very fussy in how quick they colonise but making little tweaks here and there to encourage them can be the key to success.

Skins.

 

[Uriel]

Like i said i'm adding tiny amount grain or 2 of sugar size in a 500l. you just want it for tiny amount of trace elements not to start stacking up with ammonia you are already adding.

 

[SensesFail]

My ph has dropped below 7 is it worth adding baking soda to get it up to say 7.5-8 or is it worth just doing a water change?? Nitrate readings are very bright and don't seem to match any of the colours on the sheet. Soda or water change?

 

[Skins]

If it was me water change because pH low and nitrates high.

 

[SensesFail]

If it was me water change because pH low and nitrates high.

Done and dusted but the nitrites and nitrates are still very high despite changing around 100-110 litres out of 190 lol ph did go up to around 7-7.3 so I added a slight amount of soda to raise it to 7.5 - 8 going to test in a mo. Hopefully this hasn't done anything to the cycle l eeeek lol fingers crossed it all carries on! Need to try and get my cycle time back just added ammonia at 10pm but my 12 hrs are around 9am and 9pm

 

[Skins]

If it was me water change because pH low and nitrates high.

Done and dusted but the nitrites and nitrates are still very high despite changing around 100-110 litres out of 190 lol ph did go up to around 7-7.3 so I added a slight amount of soda to raise it to 7.5 - 8 going to test in a mo. Hopefully this hasn't done anything to the cycle l eeeek lol fingers crossed it all carries on! Need to try and get my cycle time back just added ammonia at 10pm but my 12 hrs are around 9am and 9pm

When i performed my last water change/gravel vac it was down to the gravel then filled back up just over the filters intake strainer, turned the filter back on for 30mins then removed water again. I then finally filled the tank and dosed up with h/h ammonia.
Doing this brought my pH back up to 7.6 and my nitrates down from 160ppm+ to 20ppm. For me this has made some progress but as i said in a previous post everybodys cycle will differ due to us all having different water chemistry.

 

[SensesFail]

If it was me water change because pH low and nitrates high.

Done and dusted but the nitrites and nitrates are still very high despite changing around 100-110 litres out of 190 lol ph did go up to around 7-7.3 so I added a slight amount of soda to raise it to 7.5 - 8 going to test in a mo. Hopefully this hasn't done anything to the cycle l eeeek lol fingers crossed it all carries on! Need to try and get my cycle time back just added ammonia at 10pm but my 12 hrs are around 9am and 9pm

When i performed my last water change/gravel vac it was down to the gravel then filled back up just over the filters intake strainer, turned the filter back on for 30mins then removed water again. I then finally filled the tank and dosed up with h/h ammonia.
Doing this brought my pH back up to 7.6 and my nitrates down from 160ppm+ to 20ppm. For me this has made some progress but as i said in a previous post everybodys cycle will differ due to us all having different water chemistry.

I may have to do another one sometime I'll see how it goes my nitrite readings and nitrate are still high the ammonia is being processed well within 12 hrs but still waiting for that all important nitrite drop lol

 

[kporteo]

It can/could be weeks before you see your nitrites drop to zero, as every day youre adding more and more ammonia, which in turn is being processed into nitrite = looooaaaadssss of nitrite to have to change to zero the first time!

Ya never know though, you might end up like me and never get a spike?
K

 

[The Taffy Apple]

i have found that during my fishless cycle that a couple of 90% water changes have done me no harm what-so-ever..

My cycle has stalled 3/4 times due to my PH crashing..so i added some Bicarb Of Soda and it kick started the process lovely.

 

[waterdrop]

I'm just giving personal experience. If you cycle stalls due to massive amounts of nitrates or your PH completely bottoming out then you really are left with no option but to do a water change. But if you can avoid them i probably would. During stage 2 with the nitrite spike i dropped my ammonia dose to 2ppm rather than 4 and only upped it to 4ppm once the nitrites had cleared. Genuinely happened over night. 1 day off the scale next day 0 nitrite. I then upped my dosing to 4-5ppm. I got into my qualifying week but then either ph or Nitrate messed up my nitrite cycle and started getting readings again. So did a full water change at this point.

I also add minute quantities of fish food. I mean like a piece of sugar sized. As i heard it contains some trace elements phosphate and potassium i believe off the top of my head that help the bacteria grow. May be rubbish or psuedo science but i figured what have i got to lose.

The other reason i think people reccomend water changes during fishless cycle is to top up trace elements in the water. But i will leave someone more educated than i to explain this one.

This is pretty close to my take from watching many threads, although I'm not nearly so worried about a big water change causing as much pause as you noticed in your case. I think that does happen but is rare. In the vast majority of cases a full water change during the 2nd/3rd stages of a fishless cycle seems to hardly pause the process for even a day, maybe one extra day. Hearing that the processing seemed to pause 4 days is rare and I'd be suspicious that that would be more often seen only in massive tanks perhaps, where of course everything happens a little slower.

If one generalizes a scale of different water chemistries across different member's tanks with generally hard, alkaline water at one end and soft acid water at the other then my feeling is that the member's with soft acid water gain an even greater benefit from a big water change (during fishless) because not only do they combat the pH drop in a natural way but they also had fewer minerals (bacteria need small traces of minerals for both their interior cell structures and the structure of their secreted biofilms) than the people with harder water.

It is also my feeling that anything less than a full down-to-the-substrate water change during fishless cycling is kind of a waste of time (unless one didn't have the time to begin with of course) because you are just trying to make a chemistry change for your "bacterial growing soup" and in my experience the bacteria don't need anything subtle (or rather, that it takes a pretty big change on our part to kick them into processing a little better if they are going to.) In fact, for soft water people I see a full water change with a recharge of ammonia (2ppm for 2nd stage people, 5ppm for 3rd stage people) and baking soda (for those who have seen fairly sharp pH drops) as a good multiple kick to the bacteria and I quite agree with the tiny pinch (quite tiny for instance in a 30g or less) of flake food (plenty of people have had successful fishless cycles without it but it can't hurt and the logic adding a little more variety to the trace elements present works just fine as far as I'm concerned (there are a variety of heteromorphic bacterial species present that are competing with our autotrophs and they may be "stealing" most of some particular element is a possible (unfounded) speculation.)

~~waterdrop~~