# Fishless Cycling



## AMP (Nov 11, 2006)

On Day for of my Cycling, Have been adding 4ppm of NH4 ACS Grade faithfully at 1200 hrs, So Far I have seen the NH3 drop to 1ppm by the next day and the NO2 stays constant at 0ppm. add 10ml NH4 and I am up to 4ppm.

According to a few, I am told this may take close to a week or two before the No2 spikes. Has anyone else taken notice of this process? Not that I am worried, just curious from those that have done this process. I am not much into Killing off fish to achieve a goal 

10ml per 90Gallons is giving me 4ppm by the way. Thanks for any feed back....


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## Homer_Simpson (Apr 2, 2007)

AMP said:


> On Day for of my Cycling, Have been adding 4ppm of NH4 ACS Grade faithfully at 1200 hrs, So Far I have seen the NH3 drop to 1ppm by the next day and the NO2 stays constant at 0ppm. add 10ml NH4 and I am up to 4ppm.
> 
> According to a few, I am told this may take close to a week or two before the No2 spikes. Has anyone else taken notice of this process? Not that I am worried, just curious from those that have done this process. I am not much into Killing off fish to achieve a goal
> 
> 10ml per 90Gallons is giving me 4ppm by the way. Thanks for any feed back....


I experimented with and was able to successfully fishless cycle a 5 gallon "unplanted" hex tank in 13 days, using "Goldex" brand household ammonia and Septo-Bac.

The ammonia spike continued for 7 days with daily additions of ammonia. After 7 days, the nitrite spiked, ammonia dropped off to zero and remained at zero, while the nitrite spike continued. When the nitrite spiked, I added the Septo-Bac, and nitrite dropped to zero after 6 days. Then nitrates spiked and ammonia and nitrites continued to read zero. This is when I did a partial water change and added some plants. I tried to maintain nitrates at least 8ppm for the plants sake. I added fish. No problems to report. Ammonia and nitrites continued to read zero. After about 3 months, I noticed the development of brown dust algae and green dot algae, despite the fact that C02 was being injected into the tank, 50% weekly water changes were being performed, excel was dosed at double doses, lighting was within acceptable intensity and duration parameters, and tested nutrients(with the exception of extremely high phosphates) tended to be within acceptable parameters for a planted tank.


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## AMP (Nov 11, 2006)

Wierd , I noticed that the NO3 gave me a reading of 5 on day two, and is staying this way on Day three.


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## ed seeley (Dec 1, 2006)

In the past when cycling a tank I've just added fish food to the tank rather than going for ammonia sources. My reasoning for this (as well as the ease of doing it!) is that you want to build up a population of the heterotrophic bacteria that break more complex organic wastes down into ammonia as well as the population of the bacteria that reduce ammonia to nitrite and nitrate. I would build up to the amount I would feed the fish when they were in there, the theory being that, when the fish were added there would be exactly the same amount of nutrients going in as there was before and therefore, hopefully, there would be no problems!
It always worked very well for me, but it probably doesn't matter at all which way you do it.

Just bear in mind the inaccuracies of test kits! Unless they've been calibrated, they do sometimes give some wierd results.


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## AMP (Nov 11, 2006)

Ed,
Thanx for the feed back, I did contemplate getting another No2 kit, this one is a year old now, and one would never know the accuracies unless you had something to verify the results with.


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