Your Fishless Cycle: The "do" And "do Not" List

[Gvilleguy]

Just saw a post from Kporteo on another thread that was a more clear explanation of when to reduce ammonia dosing. I have modified that part accordingly, and also added a few more notes in the introduction.

 

[Kesaph]

I was wondering why when drawing near the end of cycling it is only recommended to dose the ammonia on the 24 hr mark and not the 12 hr?

If we are trying to prove the bacterias ability to process 4ppm of Ammonia and the resulting Nitrites in a short amount of time is there any benefit in leaving the tank essentially inactive for the next 12 hours?

Yes, allowing the colonies to sit at zero for a while is called pulsing and is used in the WWTP world (waste water treatment plants, one of the other sources of scientific literature.) There are a couple of other reasons for this. The main reason is that you are dealing with a set of numbers that are going up and down on a graph and you'd like to remove the confustion of your own "injection" points as much as possible so that the picture is more about the colonies (you hope,) so making the main thing you do to the tank as regular as possible helps this. The third reason is so that we are not building up as much nitrate (since both nitrate and nitrite themselves can being to inhibit growth as they grow in concentration in the water environment the bacteria are seeing. You'll note this is the same as the tweek we do to drop dosing to 2-3ppm during the nitrite spike stage.)

~~waterdrop~~

Can you give that explanation another go? I've read it a few times and primarily still don't
a) see what the benefit of 'pulsing' is (a quick google search didn't reveal much either), but also
b) understand why a doubling of dosages (especially if at lower 2-3ppm levels) would mask what the bacteria are doing. Surely we would know more what they are doing as you are testing for actual results twice a day instead of once, and
c) see why water changes couldn't overcome a nitrate build up.

Cheers

 

[electropunk06]

Hi
one thing which would be good to test would be how effective the products which say they speed up a cycle or instant cycle actually are.
Lloyd

 

[Gvilleguy]

Hi
one thing which would be good to test would be how effective the products which say they speed up a cycle or instant cycle actually are.
Lloyd

I agree - good suggestion.

 

[Aqua Tom]

Hi
one thing which would be good to test would be how effective the products which say they speed up a cycle or instant cycle actually are.
Lloyd

I agree - good suggestion.

+2

 

[Warehouse]

Can you give that explanation another go? I've read it a few times and primarily still don't
a) see what the benefit of 'pulsing' is (a quick google search didn't reveal much either)

Let me try. Now I don't profess to being an expert in this field, far from it, look at my join date, but a couple of years ago I laid a new lawn which is a seriously slow grower compared to bacteria. Now with my new lawn I was clearly told to water it every day for the first few weeks so it grew in it's new environment and put down roots. I soon had healthy new grass growing ready for it's first mow a month later. Once the lawn was established after a few months, the instructions clearly stated not to water it too much, but to leave it sometimes to try and find it's own water source. This is supposed to encourage stronger roots and far hardier grass long term. Over watered grass is in serious trouble during a drout, whereas sensibly watered grass will survive well.

I have to assume that dosing to 5ppm of Ammonia is akin to watering the grass every day when it's new, but when the bacteria is getting through the dosage in 24 hours, not giving the bacteria all the food it needs in the early days leads to a far healthier and sturdier colony long term.


But I may be wrong!

 

[Aqua Tom]

Can you give that explanation another go? I've read it a few times and primarily still don't
a) see what the benefit of 'pulsing' is (a quick google search didn't reveal much either)

Let me try. Now I don't profess to being an expert in this field, far from it, look at my join date, but a couple of years ago I laid a new lawn which is a seriously slow grower compared to bacteria. Now with my new lawn I was clearly told to water it every day for the first few weeks so it grew in it's new environment and put down roots. I soon had healthy new grass growing ready for it's first mow a month later. Once the lawn was established after a few months, the instructions clearly stated not to water it too much, but to leave it sometimes to try and find it's own water source. This is supposed to encourage stronger roots and far hardier grass long term. Over watered grass is in serious trouble during a drout, whereas sensibly watered grass will survive well.

I have to assume that dosing to 5ppm of Ammonia is akin to watering the grass every day when it's new, but when the bacteria is getting through the dosage in 24 hours, not giving the bacteria all the food it needs in the early days leads to a far healthier and sturdier colony long term.


But I may be wrong!

My bacteria has roots?

 

[Warehouse]

My bacteria has roots?

How else can they cling on to ceramics without them?

OK, then look at kids who eat too much food. Fat kids are way lazier and less energetic than normal sized kids. Same with bacteria.

 

[waterdrop]

I was wondering why when drawing near the end of cycling it is only recommended to dose the ammonia on the 24 hr mark and not the 12 hr?

If we are trying to prove the bacterias ability to process 4ppm of Ammonia and the resulting Nitrites in a short amount of time is there any benefit in leaving the tank essentially inactive for the next 12 hours?

Yes, allowing the colonies to sit at zero for a while is called pulsing and is used in the WWTP world (waste water treatment plants, one of the other sources of scientific literature.) There are a couple of other reasons for this. The main reason is that you are dealing with a set of numbers that are going up and down on a graph and you'd like to remove the confustion of your own "injection" points as much as possible so that the picture is more about the colonies (you hope,) so making the main thing you do to the tank as regular as possible helps this. The third reason is so that we are not building up as much nitrate (since both nitrate and nitrite themselves can being to inhibit growth as they grow in concentration in the water environment the bacteria are seeing. You'll note this is the same as the tweek we do to drop dosing to 2-3ppm during the nitrite spike stage.)

~~waterdrop~~

Can you give that explanation another go? I've read it a few times and primarily still don't
a) see what the benefit of 'pulsing' is (a quick google search didn't reveal much either), but also
b) understand why a doubling of dosages (especially if at lower 2-3ppm levels) would mask what the bacteria are doing. Surely we would know more what they are doing as you are testing for actual results twice a day instead of once, and
c) see why water changes couldn't overcome a nitrate build up.

Cheers

Yes, (I may not have time to make it through much at the moment but will be back with more when I get a chance if that happens)...

First you have to put this all in perspective. I think of it all as a long winding road of speculations and trial and error and plenty of misunderstandings and you've been around here longer than me and may know more bits than I do. I believe Chris Cow and others began the whole fishless cycling thing in the early 1980s. There was plenty of trial and error on usenet in those days, prior to any web. Then there were plenty of web writeups. Skipping quickly ahead we have our own RDD (rdd1952) giving us a really good writeup after consolidating info from a number of other web sites and taking into account discussions and experience at TFF. That is our main reference article stored in the Beginners Resource Center. After that, MW (Miss Wiggle), BTT (backtotropical) and I did a year or so of watching fishless cycling threads and noticing what sort of problems were associated with failures, from which we developed the concept of the "qualifying week." Overlapping this came a couple of years of OM47 (oldman47) and I continuing to watch a lot of fishless cycling threads closely and speculating on and trying the tweek dropping the dosing from 5 to 2-3ppm during the nitrite spike phase, which is one of the things being discussed here. (I assume you've studied/used the RDD article?)

[ok, got to run, just as I thought, more later!]

~~waterdrop~~

 

[waterdrop]

I was wondering why when drawing near the end of cycling it is only recommended to dose the ammonia on the 24 hr mark and not the 12 hr?

If we are trying to prove the bacterias ability to process 4ppm of Ammonia and the resulting Nitrites in a short amount of time is there any benefit in leaving the tank essentially inactive for the next 12 hours?

Yes, allowing the colonies to sit at zero for a while is called pulsing and is used in the WWTP world (waste water treatment plants, one of the other sources of scientific literature.) There are a couple of other reasons for this. The main reason is that you are dealing with a set of numbers that are going up and down on a graph and you'd like to remove the confustion of your own "injection" points as much as possible so that the picture is more about the colonies (you hope,) so making the main thing you do to the tank as regular as possible helps this. The third reason is so that we are not building up as much nitrate (since both nitrate and nitrite themselves can being to inhibit growth as they grow in concentration in the water environment the bacteria are seeing. You'll note this is the same as the tweek we do to drop dosing to 2-3ppm during the nitrite spike stage.)

~~waterdrop~~

Can you give that explanation another go? I've read it a few times and primarily still don't
a) see what the benefit of 'pulsing' is (a quick google search didn't reveal much either), but also
b) understand why a doubling of dosages (especially if at lower 2-3ppm levels) would mask what the bacteria are doing. Surely we would know more what they are doing as you are testing for actual results twice a day instead of once, and
c) see why water changes couldn't overcome a nitrate build up.

Cheers

Yes, (I may not have time to make it through much at the moment but will be back with more when I get a chance if that happens)...

First you have to put this all in perspective. I think of it all as a long winding road of speculations and trial and error and plenty of misunderstandings and you've been around here longer than me and may know more bits than I do. I believe Chris Cow and others began the whole fishless cycling thing in the early 1980s. There was plenty of trial and error on usenet in those days, prior to any web. Then there were plenty of web writeups. Skipping quickly ahead we have our own RDD (rdd1952) giving us a really good writeup after consolidating info from a number of other web sites and taking into account discussions and experience at TFF. That is our main reference article stored in the Beginners Resource Center. After that, MW (Miss Wiggle), BTT (backtotropical) and I did a year or so of watching fishless cycling threads and noticing what sort of problems were associated with failures, from which we developed the concept of the "qualifying week." Overlapping this came a couple of years of OM47 (oldman47) and I continuing to watch a lot of fishless cycling threads closely and speculating on and trying the tweek dropping the dosing from 5 to 2-3ppm during the nitrite spike phase, which is one of the things being discussed here. (I assume you've studied/used the RDD article?)

[ok, got to run, just as I thought, more later!]

OK, so for installment two I'm going to attempt another paragraph of baseline stuff that I hope we agree on. The business of growing the two colonies is an example of biology, not chemistry: the cells are complicated living things, living in an environment more complicated than just the things we measure. Even the simplest of cells use a vast array of complex molecules, made up of many, many elements and potentially respond to many physical factors. As observers, we have to guard against our own natural tendency to reduce the situation to being just about those factors we come in watching (eg. a simple chemistry experiment where it's ammonia in, cells surrounded by water then produce nitrite out, then the next species in nitrite in and nitrate out and you can just vary the quanties and get more and less.) Instead of course, the actual chemistry is staggering. The cells need many elements to maintain their own tissue structures and to reproduce still more identical working cells. Groups of cells work together to create complex structures called biofilms, which have features such as calcium channels to help maintain and optimize water flow through the colony to provide sufficient oxygen, ammonia and traces. It is likely this building activity has phases itself. Until recently it was not known that biofilms had structure. They were thought to be uniformly random, or just not thought about much. Likewise, cell growth and reproduction has a process that involves time and phases. The bacteriologists can show that there is a quiescent phase, followed by a growth phase, followed by a relapse before the cycle begins again. Although our particular autotrophs are not so heavily studied, in other bacteria we know that if differing environmental factors are applied at different times in the reproductive cycle, different results may occur.

All of this just to say, in a very crude way, that we should always consider that we, as human observers, should always keep in mind that we are in the presence of biology (complex organisms operating in an environment that may have many of the elements of the periodic table and many physical attributes (pressure, temperature, light, proximity of different elements to each other etc.) at play, even though we may be only crudely measuring temperature, pH, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, light etc. And that therefor it makes sense to be ever ready to allow that our knowledge of the overall process and effects is likely very incomplete.

(thanks for wading through that, all one or two of you who read this kind of stuff, it probably just marks my poor ability to express myself but I needed to get through it before just trying to say anything about the 3 questions, which I hope to get to in the next post, lol.)

WD


~~waterdrop~~

 

[Kesaph]

That's a very fair and reasoned response and makes a heck of a lot of sense.
Bring on the rest!

PS It may look like I've been around for a long time from my join date, but there's been a fish free five year hiatus in the middle

 

[Gvilleguy]

I've seen a few threads recently where users swapped out all their cycled filter media "per the manufacturer's recommendation". Ugh. I would go out of my way to buy a filter (as long as it worked okay) if the instruction manual would be honest about when you REALLY need to change out your media. I added a DO NOT item to the thread for not swapping media out until it degrades, and then do it in phases.

 

[Wend]

great post

great post

6. DO NOT attempt to smell the ammonia! (i learnt the hard way)

+1 I got quite a shock when I did.

lol me too, it kind of smacks you in the face!

 

[Axyadbad]

great post

great post

6. DO NOT attempt to smell the ammonia! (i learnt the hard way)

+1 I got quite a shock when I did.

+1 aswell, my nose suffered a little