timmy350is

Hello,
Thanks for having time to read my thread
about 2 weeks ago i bought a tropical set up about 75 litres
I throughly washed the substrate and everything else filled it up and put the reccommended number of drops of the tap water neutraliser I let everything run for about 4 days then I placed in 2 small live plants to help with the water parameters. After a further 3 days i then bought some fish 5 red eye tetra and a small sucker fish. Now heres the thing I did not have the Test kits at the time to test the water but I thought it would be fine and added them anyway. After about 4 days the fish are fine and i finally got my hands on a Ammonia and Nitrite test kit dont have the nitrate kit just yet, My readings are as followed
Ammonia 0.5
Nitrite 0.2
Ph is 7
Temp 26 degrees
I know i was impatient and probably putting my fish through stress and pain and i regret this. Currently im doing about a 30% water change daily since yesterday and adding my Chlorine Neutraliser to the tap water before I put it in and making sure the temperature is close to the tank temp aswell.
My question is should i keep doing this daily?
and will my ammonia and nitrite come down after a few days?
Any Help will be good thanks

Lucy

Hi timmy350is welcome to Fish Lore

It can take up to a month to cycle a tank. Just keep up the water changes, you might want to step it up to 50% and use Prime as your water conditioner. Prime will detoxify the ammonia but still make it available for bacteria.

Keep testing and make a log of your readings.

Here's a basic explanation of the nitrogen cycle:

First your ammonia (from fish waste and left over food) will rise.
In a few weeks you'll see the nitrite levels rise and the ammonia levels start to drop.
After a few more weeks you'll see the nitrate levels rise and the nitrite levels drop.
Ammonia and nitrites are toxic to your fish. So until your cycle is complete, you need to keep the levels down with daily water changes
When you having readings of 0 on both ammonia and nitrites with some nitrates showing, your cycle is done.

Hope this helped.

Good luck.

timmy350is

Thanks for your reply
Your help is appreciated

clinton1621

If you can find a product called Tetra Safe Start then you could use this to speed up the cycle and make your fish safer during that time. If you cant find this then the only other product I would recommend would be Seachem Stability, which is similar but not quite as good. You really need a nitrate test though, as Lucy said above you need to know all 3, ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate in order to know when the tank is fully cycled.