Trouble With First Cycle

It’s been weeks and I’m having a lot of trouble getting my new tank to cycle. It started with my daughter winning a goldfish at the carnival. I ran to the pet store to buy a tank, and obviously that didn’t go well. Ammonia was off the charts.

Since the death of the goldfish, the tank has been running fishless about 3 weeks. Ammonia is within normal parameters now, but nitrites are very high and have been for over a week. I had been avoiding doing a water change to get it to cycle, and now I have some brown algae growing as well. LFS told me to add some API quick start.

Any advice? Just want to put a small school of neons in this 10 gal.

 

Sounds to me like you're on schedule. The bacteria that you want to grow though will need to continue being fed. Several ways to do that but I didn't see in your OP if you have been feeding the tank or not. If not, then that's why your tank stalled.

 

I’ve been putting in a flake of food every couple days

Anything wrong with adding some quick start at this point?

And should I leave the algae alone until the tank hasn’t finished cycling?

 

Okay. Just me but adding fish food is a very inexact way to feed a tank. It's hard to guage what level you're raising the ammonia to and hard to be consistent.
I think ideally you raise the ammonia level to X (some say 2ppm) and when it drops to 0 do it again. Keep doing that for as long as it takes for ammonia and nitrite to drop to zero within 12-24 hours of the tank being fed. At that point you should have high readings of nitrates - the final byproduct of the nitrogen cycle. When that happens you take out 80-90 percent of the water, add fresh treated water, let the temp stabilize and you should be ready for fish then.
Cycling can take weeks. Like maybe 6-7 depending on pH, temperature and other factors.

 

How should I be increasing the ammonia then?

I’ve been taking water to LFS for testing, can you recommend a testing kit?

 

Feeding a tank straight ammonia can give you the control on dosing properly. There's a thread (might be on the nitrogen cycling discussion area?) on doing a fishless cycle. Someone in there does the math so you can calculate how much to add to get X ppm.

API Master Freshwater Test Kit.

Oh, and don't sweat the algae, that can be cleaned up later. One way to discourage it just because it's unsightly is to leave any light on the tank off while cycling, in fact you can just cover the tank and keep it in the dark the whole time.

 

There is a live plant in there but I don’t think it’s going to last much longer.

 

Oh just want to add, great choice of a screen name, lol.

 

Sax is my life, trying to make fish my hobby

 

I'm not a plant person (yet) so I can't advise on that but plants will use some of the ammonia as fertilizer.

BTW, Ace Hardware sells their own brand of pure ammonia. You CANNOT use just any ammonia product from the store. If it has surfactants or any other additives it is no Bueno. That includes lemon smell etc... You want straight ammonia. I think theirs is 5%. You'll need to do some metric to US conversions to get the amount needed but once you do the math you'll have a better understanding of what's going on plus a good test kit will keep you "in the know" as to where your cycle is at the moment.