Day 12 cycle

[Leonfish1234]

hiya
my tank cycle is on day 12 im using fish food ever other day ammonia is 0.25 and nitrites are 5 ppm are this levels normal
many thanks

 

[FishGirl38]

I would say so, seems youre about midway through, your nitrosomonas bacteria have kicked in nd started eating the ammonia.

But your nitrobacter colony still needs to develop to take care of the high nitrite. If you have fish in the tank, youll want to do a small water change here soon. .5ppm nitrite is toxic to fish. But its right at 'toxic' for now, it should start decreasing on its own soon.

 

[Leonfish1234]

I would say so, seems youre about midway through, your nitrosomonas bacteria have kicked in nd started eating the ammonia.

But your nitrobacter colony still needs to develop to take care of the high nitrite. If you have fish in the tank, youll want to do a small water change here soon. .5ppm nitrite is toxic to fish. But its right at 'toxic' for now, it should start decreasing on its own soon.

Cool thanks alot i started the cycle on the 28th of july so im probably gonna wait till mid september then test the levels are good
should i feed the tank daily or every other day i was gonna put a fish in for fosh cycle but looking into it. The fish experiences pain from Ammonia burns so i dont want to put fish through that
many thanks

 

[Donthemon]

Better to use ammonia to cycle with than fish food if you can. You can dose the ammonia to the correct level.

 

[dylan118tang]

Yeah, using Ace/Austin's ammonia is much easier. Fish food will work, but I had a hard time raising the ammonia to 4ppm with fish food alone. You want to dose enough ammonia to reach 4ppm consistently, until your tank can convert 4ppm ammonia level to 0 ammonia and 0 nitrite within 24 hours. I wouldn't recommend doing a water change during the fishless cycling process, unless you overdose ammonia above 4ppm.

Another problem with fish food is that, it needs time to rot, to become ammonia. So you will probably have no easy way to measure how much food to add to reach desired ammonia levels.

 

[mattgirl]

Cool thanks alot i started the cycle on the 28th of july so im probably gonna wait till mid september then test the levels are good
should i feed the tank daily or every other day i was gonna put a fish in for fosh cycle but looking into it. The fish experiences pain from Ammonia burns so i dont want to put fish through that
many thanks

Some folks really frown on doing a fish in cycles but in my humble opinion as long as one is willing to do all the water changes necessary to keep the ammonia down to negligible levels the fish will not be harmed. Thankfully there is more than one way to cycle a tank.

Fish food will work. You are basically ghost feeding the tank just as you would if there were fish in there so just add a small pinch daily. The main problem with using fish food is the mess you end up with since all that food is just sitting there and also clogging up your filter as it accumulates. It will probably end up growing fungus and will look pretty bad. Once the cycle is complete you will have to siphon all of the decomposing food out of there.

Since you've chosen not to do a fish in cycle adding pure liquid ammonia is a cleaner way to feed the cycle. Since this is a 54L (15 gallon tank) 2 or even 3ppm ammonia will grow enough bacteria the handle the future bio-load in this tank. If pure ammonia is difficult to get, a piece of raw shrimp will do the same thing as the fish food and in the end won't leave behind as big a mess.

 

[Leonfish1234]

Cool gotta guys thank you