Glad you caught the humor
You'll find that OM47 and I are often the straight men and its others that have to lighten us up...
Which, being said, gets me back to the begin serious stuff.. The huge variables in fishless cycling, in my opinion, are:
1) The random number of initial Nitrosomonas and Nitrospira and their slight genetic morphs that just happen to be in your personal source water (think about it - you turn on your particular tap in your house and we count on the fact that these two species are so ubiquitous thoughout the world that you will be sure to have at least a few of each of them in there! Well, that's amazing but the rub is that you might get a dozen of them or you might get a million! That places each individual at a very different starting place on the curved exponential graph line that follows that individuals total bacteria count as those bacteria divide and multiply.)
2) The tap water chemical properties you've been given. Once again, as an individual in a house out there somewhere in the world you will be dealt a random card. Sure, the water authorities in the civilized world will try to give you water that doesn't make you or too many other humans sick, but the similarity stops there and if you got down to a lot of analysis of the water you might find great differences in all the different inorganic and organic free-riders that come along with all the H2O molecules.
3) The filter! Yet another factor we've usually too hurried to analyze and would be at a loss to explain to a large extent even if we tried! Yet of course this is by definition yet another humongous varible just sitting out there at the start of every fishless cycle case (we help with probably dozens of cases every month or two here in our beginner section) we watch a thread on. The variation is huge: there are members running little 20 $/pound filters that are basically pieces of junk that allow the water to leak all around the media or have the wrong types or amounts of media. There are members with great huge expensive external cannister filters sporting giant beds of expensive media and tightly controlled water pathways. And of course there's everything in-between.
And these THREE are just to get started! Anyway, my purpose in pointing this out is just to say that the level of detail (I'm one of the ones most guilty of this!
) we all get down to in tweeking temperature and pH and other factors really kind of pale in comparison to the other huge unknowns we are all subject to!
OK, getting back to our subject, *temperature*. The only really safe generalization we can make is that there's an increase in our growth rates as we move up through the reasonable water temperatures we'd encounter in fishless cycling tanks in homes. I doubt we've ever had anyone running a chiller on a freshwater fishless cycling tank just to tell us it took a year, so our cases would probably start with some guy in the Orkneys fishless cycling without a heater and with a broken window in his fish room. (all those cases have proved slow
) Then we work our way through all the boring average houses with heat and heaters in the tank and finally we're back to the question at hand 76F.. 84F.. 90F? Well, you're right, we know the warmer stuff mid-eightys up to.. somewhere.. is faster. That's been shown both from just watching all the hundreds of threads and also from the scientific literature (which some of us geeks read from time to time and others of us actually do for a living I think!) The guy who is serving as our TFF baseline currently is RDD, the writer of our fishless cycling article. He put in some quality time researching and summarizing many of the different articles and experiences out there starting way back at the Chris Cow beginnings in 1980 and moving forward. RDD's last feeling on it was that the low 90s(F) were a promising possibility. So that's a strong note if favor of trying it. The little bits on information counter to that came from another fellow, Tim Hovanec who's about the only guy we know who actually put some rows of tanks up in a laboratory and worked on some fishless cycling questions while getting his doctorate. Somewhere (and I apologize I can't remember where) in his several published papers and some of his interactions here on TFF, he expressed some concerns about problems that might arise as you go above 84F. That plus, I believe, a few random cases with really warm water that seemed not be particularly fast where the thing that settled me down at 84F. But as you can see, there's not a strong case either way, so in truth I really don't think there'd be much risk in trying any of these temperatures between mid-eightys and low ninetys if you want to. Just be sure and keep it right on your chosen temp so we will have a decent data point to store up in our minds later.
~~waterdrop~~
